2 jury members go public: Ritu Sarin & Catherine Gicheru

For each of it different grant programmes Journalismfund.eu works with a separate, independent jury. All of juries consist of experienced investigative journalism experts.

Our jury members remain anonymous until they leave the jury. This is to protect both the jury process and the confidentiality of the submitted investigation proposals. After their mandate is finished, we make the names of the jury members public.

Today we reveal two jury members of our Money Trail project, which offered grants to (teams of) journalists to investigate cross-border illicit financial flows, tax abuse money laundering and corruption in Africa, Asia and Europe.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. 

Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over 35 years. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999, and has worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files and Fincen Files. She is also the author of two books, the last being one on the Panama Papers investigation in India, published in 2019.

Sarin has received numerous awards for her journalistic work, the two most recent being the prestigious International Press Institute (IPI-India) award for excellence in journalism in 2018, to be followed in 2019 by the Red Ink award of the Mumbai Press Club for the Implant Files investigation.

The grant programme is a great opportunity for more and more journalists to experience the challenge of cross-border investigations. The jury has decided on the grants after lengthy and sometimes heated deliberations, in the end, arriving at a consensus.
- Ritu Sarin

Catherine Gicheru

Catherine Gicheru is a Knight Fellow of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), and director of the Africa Women Journalist Project, which is dedicated to strengthening the voices of women journalists and driving coverage of under-reported gender, health and development issues that affect marginalised groups. She is a veteran Kenyan journalist, whose investigations have focused on extra-judicial killings, arms rackets, corruption and the banking sector. 

Gicheru was the first woman bureau chief and the first female news editor of the Nation Media Group and was founding editor of the Star newspaper in Nairobi. She co-founded PesaCheck, East Africa’s budget and public finance fact checking and verification initiative.

She is a recipient of the International Women's Media Foundation's Courage in Journalism Award and was named by New African magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Africans of 2018. Gicheru is a member of the board of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and also serves on the board of directors of the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF).

The Money Trail programme is one of the best examples of funding globally-oriented investigative journalism projects which also have regional or local impact. The grants have been able to provide journalists with an opportunity to collaborate and expose scandal and corruption across borders while at the same time sharing skills and expertise. It was a privilege to serve on the jury.
- Catherine Gicheru

143 proposals

Ritu and Catherine were jury members from 2018 until 2021. For the Money Trail grant programme they assessed 143 project proposals and granted in total more than €635,000 to 79 investigations by 210 journalists from four different continents.

You can take a look at the supported Money Trail stories here.

Here’s an overview of Journalismfund.eu’s former jury members.

Two other former jury members give tips on how a good application should look like: “If you want a grant, here’s what you should do.”