Amanda Sperber is a multi-award-winning correspondent, investigative journalist and multimedia story-teller. Her work has prompted changes to U.S. military policy, high-profile reports from international human rights organizations and open Congressional letters to the military. Since Sperber started reporting on U.S. airstrikes in Somalia, the military admitted its first civilian casualties since it began carrying out strikes in 2007. It also instituted a civilian casualty reporting protocol.

Sperber won the Kurt Schork Memorial Award (Freelancer Category) for her investigations in Somalia. She won the One World Media Award (Popular Features Category) for her coverage of sexualized violence in South Sudan’s civil war. Her work has been recognized by the Frontline Club and the Amnesty International Media Awards. She is an IACC-Transparency International “Young Journalist” and a partner with Type Investigate. She has received grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting and the International Women’s Media Foundation. Sperber is a member of the Frontline Freelance Register. She completed RISC (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues) training in 2015 and was HEFAT certified in 2017.

As a foreign correspondent in East Africa she’s taken a World War I-era German warship down Tanzania’s Lake Tanganyika to write about how the way it has been repurposed highlights Europe’s colonial legacy on the continent. In South Sudanese displacement settlements in Uganda she interviewed survivors of rape on how they navigate their relationship with their children. From Ethiopia, she reported on how European scientists use earth analogues, like the Danakil Depression in the north of the country, to inform their research on Mars. Covering U.S. foreign policy in Somalia, she broke news about civilian deaths in airstrikes and revealed back-door dealings between the American and Somali governments. She also broke news about the opening of the first American “facility” in Somalia since “Black Hawk Down,” and filed an exclusive on the U.S. Army’s attempts to develop a road between military bases in the Horn of Africa.

Sperber received an MSc from The London School of Economics, and a B.S. from New York University. She also studied with the School for International Training in Ghana. She speaks conversational French and Swahili.

CONTACT

Tips? Ideas? Want to chat about coverage? Email: amanda.sperber@gmail.com