Afrobarometer Knowledge Translation Manager Josephine Appiah-Nyamekye Sanny was honored as Public Relations Discovery of the Year 2020 at the Institute of Public Relations (IPR) Ghana Excellence Awards Friday in Akosombo, Ghana.
The award recognizes individuals “who demonstrated ability, capacity, and tremendous professional development in the field of public relations and communications in the year under review,” according to the IPR, Ghana.
Sanny is a bilingual communications practitioner credited with cutting-edge communication strategies across several African countries. Her expertise includes government relations and policy engagement, media relations, digital PR, community relations, internal relations, data visualization, and issues and crisis management.
In 2020, she was Afrobarometer communications coordinator for anglophone West Africa and communications team lead for the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD- Ghana). She supervised, mentored, and built the capacity of communications/dissemination officers of Afrobarometer national partners in Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Cabo Verde, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and São Tomé and Príncipe. She also oversaw the development and implementation of CDD-Ghana’s communications strategies and the production of communications materials for various projects. During the 2020 general election in Ghana, she led the communications team for the Coalition of Domestic Elections Observers (CODEO) to provide information about the electoral environment, educate the public on key elections-related issues, and provide up-to-date information about CODEO’s elections observation findings.
Sanny has been credited with exploring innovative strategies to increase visibility and policy uptake of Afrobarometer and CDD-Ghana research findings, feed timely and reliable research data into trending national and global discourse, and strengthen the organizations’ partnerships with stakeholders, policy actors, and potential donors at local, national, regional, and global levels. She has authored several research papers on themes such as youth, migration, media freedom, violent extremism, public service delivery, and COVID-19, which were widely circulated and gained traction on international platforms, including BBC, VOA, DW, the Washington Post, and the Brookings Institution.
She holds a master’s degree in communications studies from the University of Ghana and is an accredited member of IPR, Ghana. She is also a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, UK (CIPR-UK) and has been named one of the Top 10 Women in PR Ghana for two consecutive years.
