Nima Elbagir Biography
Nima Elbagir is an American anchor working for CNN as a Chief International Investigative Correspondent. She joined the CNN news team in February 2011, after previously working for ITN News.
Nima Elbagir Career
Elbagir has won many awards as CNN’s Chief International Investigative Correspondent. She started working for CNN in 2011 as a reporter in Johannesburg. She then moved to the network’s Nairobi bureau and then to London, where she is now. Elbagir won the prestigious 2019 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in the Investigative category and was named “Television Journalist of the Year” by the Royal Television Society in 2020. The jurors said that her “fearless reporting across Africa, from a modern-day slave market in Libya to child labor in Congo and a smuggler’s network in Nigeria, documented rarely seen exploitation and corruption.”
Elbagir won the 2018 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. She is now part of a small group of highly regarded female reporters who have been honored for their work in some of the world’s most dangerous areas. The International Center for Journalists gave her the 2018 Excellence in International Reporting Award for her work as well. Lawmakers have directly and often referred to Elbagir’s reports on violations of human rights. Most recently, they have done so in connection with her investigations into the violence in northern Tigray, Ethiopia. She has been to the country many times to write stories and do exclusive reports about the crisis there, which includes killings, rapes, and stopping people from getting food and other essential supplies.
In 2021, she reported from the Setit River in eastern Sudan, where she found proof that people from the Tigray town of Humera had been tortured, jailed in large groups, and then killed. During the civil war in Tigray, she also looked into how the Ethiopian government used Ethiopian Airlines, the country’s main business airline, to send and receive weapons from Eritrea. Because of what CNN reported, Ethiopia would not be able to use the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a valuable US trade program, in 2022.
Elbagir went back to Yemen in 2021 and found that a blockade by Saudi Arabia, which was backed by the US, caused a lot of pain and made it very hard to get food. The UN and the World Food Program both asked Saudi Arabia to lift its blockade and let fuel into the country after CNN’s report. This story came after Elbagir’s “Made in America” investigation into how American-made weapons were used and given by the Saudi-led coalition to groups in Yemen that are tied to al-Qaeda and other hardline militias. It came right after her 2018 report that proved the US made the bomb that killed 40 kids on a school bus in Yemen.
In October 2020, Nigerian security forces opened fire on calmly protesting young people who were upset about what they saw as police brutality. Elbagir looked into the shooting by looking at hours of video footage that the protesters had recorded and using time stamps, video data, and geolocation to do so. CNN did an investigation that was recently confirmed by a Nigerian court group. They found that the Nigerian army fired live ammunition into crowds at the Lekki toll gate, killing and hurting many.
In 2019, Elbagir went back to Khartoum, her city, to see how violently pro-democracy protests were put down. She did this by hiding with protesters who were calling for the removal of President Omar al-Bashir. He was finally removed from power, ending a 30-year dictatorship that Elbagir described as “marked by brutal oppression and astounding political survival.”
In 2018, Elbagir looked into the use of child labor in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Following this, Daimler, the company that makes Mercedes-Benz cars, announced an audit of its entire supply chain. She also wrote about the case of Noura Hussein, the young Sudanese girl who was given the death penalty for killing her rapist husband. After CNN reported on Hussein’s first-hand account, a Sudanese court changed her death sentence because they believed Hussein’s story.
Elbagir went to Libya with producer Raja Razek and photojournalist Alex Platt in the fall of 2017 to look into stories that African migrants were being sold at slave auctions. Elbagir and Razek went to a house outside of Tripoli with hidden cameras and watched as 12 African refugees were auctioned off in less than 10 minutes. Some of them were sold for as little as $400. The study was a big part of why the U.N. passed new sanctions against six men in June 2018 who were found to be traffickers by the U.N. Libya Sanctions Committee.
Elbagir reported about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. She went into Liberia’s quarantine zones to see how the disease had destroyed both urban and country areas. In 2014, the terrorist group Boko Haram took over 250 schoolgirls from Chibok in northern Nigeria. She was the first foreign reporter to go there and report on the events. Here, she was able to talk to two young girls who had gotten away and told her about how horrible it was to be captured. CNN won the Peabody Award in 2015 in part because of her ongoing coverage of the missing schoolgirls. Elbagir and producer Stephanie Busari got a “proof of life” video for some of the girls who had been taken almost two years ago.
Elbagir also covered several exclusive stories about Yehya Ibrahim, a Sudanese woman who was sentenced to death for apostasy. He talked to Ibrahim’s separated family and her scared husband to learn more about her story. People all over the world learned about Ibrahim’s plight through her work on this story. This helped build political pressure on the Sudanese government, which finally freed her.
She also led CNN’s coverage of the rising violence in the Central African Republic. Moreover, going on trips with French troops as they tried to bring peace to Muslim and Christian rebels who were entrenched in their fights. She reported from Somalia during the worst of the Horn of Africa famine. Elbagir had a private phone conversation with Safia Gadhafi in Tripoli, who is married to the former leader of Libya. Elbagir talked to Egypt’s Justice Minister, Mohamed Abdelaziz al-Juindy, after the change. Al-Juindy said that former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak should be put to death.
She also wrote from South Sudan, where the new African country was celebrating becoming free. In 2019, Elbagir and her team were praised for their one-year investigation into Father Luk Delft. This is the case of the predator priest, a priest who was sent to work for an aid organization in Africa to help families in need. Even though his Catholic order knew he had been found guilty of abusing children in Europe years before.
She covered the rising violence against women in the Congo as a freelancer for CNN. She also covered Nigeria’s 50th anniversary of freedom, the South Sudanese Referendum, and CNN’s coverage of the Hajj. Before joining CNN, Elbagir, who was born in Sudan, worked for several years for the UK’s Channel 4 in a variety of roles in 2005. She did freelance work from Kabul for Channel 4 News. She also reported for the “Unreported World” documentary series and reported and presented for Channel 4 News and More4 News.
Nima Elbagir Awards
A 2018 George Polk Award was given to Elbagir for her shocking report from Libya. She also won the Royal Television Society (RTS) Award for Scoop of the Year. In addition, she won the Golden Nymph Award at the Monte Carlo TV Festival for Best TV News Item. She also won the Television Trophy at the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Awards, and two Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) Awards in the Impact and Daily Journalism – Vi categories. The RTS 2016 Specialist Journalist of the Year was Elbagir. This was because of her work investigating abuses against women and children, such as the sale of displaced Nigerian children to Boko Haram and the mutilation of British Somali girls by FGM practitioners in Nairobi.
Nima Elagir Interviews
During this time, Elbagir had exclusives like the first interview with the Aegis security company whistleblower about the Iraq “Trophy Videos” (2005). She also had an interview with Jacob Zuma before his rape trial (2006), being the only Western journalist to report from Mogadishu during the U.S. bombing of Somalia (2007), and showing the first footage of Iranian weapons being smuggled to the Taliban (2009). Elbagir started her job as a reporter in 2002 as a stringer for Reuters in Sudan. She was one of the first people to provide video from inside Darfur. Elbagir also did work for the Economist, the FT, and Radio France International. She worked for Reuters as a Graduate Trainee in London until 2005.
Nima Elbagir Salary
Elbagir earns a salary of about $47,000-$120,000.
Nima Elbagir Net Worth
Elbagir has an estimated net worth of about $1 Million – $7 Million which she has earned through her career as a Chief International Investigative Correspondent.
Nima Elbagir Age
Elbagir was born on July 20, 1978, in Khartoum, Sudan. She is 45 years old as of 2023, and she celebrates her birthday on the 20th of July every year.
Nima Elbagir Height and Weight
Elbagir stands at a height of 5 feet 7 inches tall (1.70m) and weighs 64 kgs (141 lbs).
Nima Elbagir Family
Elbagir was born in Khartoum Sudan to Ahmed Abdullah Elbagir (father) and Ibtisam Affan (mother). Her father Ahmed was a journalist who was jailed before she was born while her mother Ibtisam was the first publisher in Sudan. The first time she moved to the UK was when she was three years old. She returned to Sudan when she was eight years old. She came back to the UK after living in Sudan for six years. Nima has a younger sister named Yousra Elbagir who is a Sudanese–British journalist and writer.
Nima Elbagir Husband and Children
Elbagir is married to Mark who is British. They first met in Sudan. They have not disclosed details about their wedding or whether they have kids. However, this information will be updated when available.
Nima Elbagir Sister
Elbagir has a younger sister named Yousra Elbagir. Yousra was born in Khartoum. From the time she was young until she was eight years old, she lived in the UK with her family. She moved back to Sudan and when she was 16, she went back to London and got her A levels. She then studied Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews and graduated with honors. When Yousra was a student at St. Andrews, she started her career as a writer by writing for student newspapers.
After she finished school in 2015, Yousra went back to Sudan to work as a reporter for a year and a half. As of 2016, she worked for Elephant Media as a producer and as an independent reporter in Khartoum. Fox News, CNN, The Financial Times, The Guardian, BBC Africa, BBC Radio 4, and HBO have all shown her work. People know Yousra for starting the #SudanUnderSanction online media campaign. In this campaign, women and men from Sudan talked about how the trade sanctions against Sudan were affecting their country.
In 2019, Yousra worked for Channel 4 and wrote about the Sudanese Revolution. She didn’t like the first steps of Sudan’s institutional shift to democracy. She said, “It’s ridiculous to leave women out of the real political progress in decades.” The big pro-democracy sit-in was able to last for almost two months because of the women who took part. While Ramadan was going on, they fed protesters who were fasting every day. They spent the night at checkpoints searching for women marchers.
Nima Elbagir Social Media Platform
Elbagir is very active on her Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages. She has 102.4k followers on Twitter 10k followers on Instagram, and 84k followers on Facebook.