NEWSMAKER HILLARY NG'WENO

Hilary Ng'weno

Born in Nairobi on June 28^th, 1938, and educated at Mangu High School and was the first Kenyan to attend Harvard (Class of ’61). He went back to Harvard as the first African fellow of the Harvard Center for International Affairs (1968-1969)

He got married to Fleur Arabelle Grandjouan on December 1^st, 1963. They have two daughters: Amolo Eva, until recently senior program director at the Gates Foundation and currently managing director of Digital Data Divide Ltd, and Bettina Amilie, until recently professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and currently on the academic planning team for the establishment of the Aga Khan University in East Africa.

Hilary Ng’weno has been a journalist since 1962, first with the Nation group of newspapers for which he was the first African editor in chief (1964-65) and later as editor-publisher of a number of his own publications, including The Weekly Review 1975-1999). For more than ten years he was also a Newsweek columnist. In 1992, he launched the first fully Kenyan-owned indigenous private TV station in Kenya, STV, but relinquished ownership in 1997 to go into freelance TV production. He has produced dozens of TV programmes, including The Making of a Nation (2007).. Until December 2011 he produced jointly with NTV the weekly TV biographical documentary series Makers of a Nation.

Outside journalism and television production, he has had, and continues to have, a wide range of interests. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museums of Kenya (1964-1968); chairman of the Kenya Museum Society (1967-1968); a trustee of the East African Wild Life Society since 1978; chairman of Kenya Wildlife Service (1990-1993) as well as a trustee of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWW-International) from 1993-1997.

Though not a trained economist, he served as a member of the Council of African Advisers to the World Bank (1991-1994); for two years (1995-1997) as chairman of the Kenya Revenue Authority, and for three years (1996-1999) a member of Kenya’s Presidential Economic Commission.

He was a member of the Population Advisory Committee of the MacArthur Foundation (1991-1997) and chairman of the Advisory Board of the Rockefeller Foundation’s African Forum for Children’s Literacy in Science and Technology (1994-97). In 1968 was awarded the John D. Rockefeller III Award given to a person under 40 years of age who in the opinion of the trustees of the John D. Rockefeller III Fund has contributed most to the wellbeing of mankind.