Philip Jakpor

As a young journalist Philip Jakpor was passionate about investigating and reporting abuses that corporations preferred to hide. His unquenchable zeal to expose corporations and injustices garnered new fire in the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) where he worked with a team of committed activists and grassroots movements demanding that Shell and other oil multinationals be held accountable for the environmental degradation in the Niger Delta region. Jakpor deployed his media expertise in the advocacy work that culminated in Nigeria’s domestication of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2015 and is still involved in exposure of the tobacco industry’s unrelenting activities aimed at thwarting enforcement of lifesaving public health laws.

Though he left the newsroom in 2007, between 2010 and 2015 he trained and helped birth the Journalist Initiative for sustainable Environment (JISE) – a network of over 250 journalists across Nigeria that now actively unearth and report environmental injustices. He continues to groom young journalists and deploys his expertise in helping organisations form workable and effective media strategies.

Jakpor brings his decade and half experience in environmental activism and development to the Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) family.