Promise Eze
Abdulrasheed Akere reports,
The African Liberty Writing Fellowship (ALWF) has selected Promise Eze, the immediate past Deputy Editor-in-chief (DEIC) of PEN PRESS UDUS as a 2023/2024 fellow. He is a fresh graduate of Education Economics from Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto (UDUS).
Promise tops the list of the 34 admitted fellows selected across 11 African countries. Prior to the selection, the fellowship application received more than 2000 entries from Africa only from which 55 applicants were selected for a 5-week intense graded training. After the training, only 34 applicants including Promise were eventually selected for the fellowship.
ALWF selected 18 applicants from Nigeria, 6 from Kenya, 2 from Ghana, and 1 applicant each from the remaining eight countries, which are: South Africa, Gambia, Zambia, Senegal, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Egypt and Tanzania.
“The training was not easy. But I am glad I pulled through. I feel very excited. I have always wanted to be an African Liberty Writing Fellow (ALWF) since 2019. It’s a dream come true for me,” Promise expressed happily.
Get to Know African Liberty Writing Fellowship
“The African Liberty Writing Fellowship program is a year-long program designed to train young Africans interested in academia, media, public policy, or any other critical-and-analytical-writing-related career, in opinion article writing. Accepted applicants will complete a five-week mandatory online course. The top thirty-five candidates from the five-week training will be admitted as African Liberty writing fellows.
“We’ve helped our fellows get featured in leading African and non-Africa media outlets. We’ve highlighted some below. You may visit our Media Hits page to see what fellows published in the last four cohorts,” ALWF portal reads.
What Inspired Promise to Apply for ALWF?
Blissfully, Promise Eze emerged as the second UDUS student selected for the African Liberty Writing Fellowship, or ALWF and was inspired to apply by Muneer Yaqub, the first ever selected fellow from UDUS.
“I applied in late April. I was inspired by Muneer Yaqub, a former president of NACJ, who is now doing his PhD at the University of Texas at Dallas, and was a fellow in the 2019/2020 cohort. I’m happy to have walked in his footsteps. I saw the opportunities the fellowship enabled him to explore. I knew I had to just go for this,” he disclosed.
When promise was asked that did he sees the selection coming or it was a surprise, he said, “Surprisingly, right from the start I knew I would be selected. I had been writing for African Liberty even before now as a contributor. I just believe that this year will not pass me by to become a fellow and it didn’t.”
“I hope to establish good relationships with editors around the world which I’m sure will strengthen my journalism career. This is the main reason why I applied. The more editors you can interact with, the more you get published,” he said.
Promise advised fellow journalists that, “Don’t stop trying. Don’t stop pitching. Don’t stop writing. Consistency is the path to success in journalism. Rome was not built in a day. You will fail but learn to see beauty in the failure and rejections.”
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About the reporter: Abdulrasheed Akere is a 300 level student at Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto (UDUS). He is an editor with PEN PRESS UDUS. He can be reached via abdulrasheedabdulkareem01@gmail.com.