By Bukola Adimula

“I just want to write. I want to write better.” 

Those were the words Linda Ngari said to herself, even before the Fellowship that would change everything. 

Law was actually her first choice, not journalism. But while waiting for her law school admission, she received an offer to study journalism at Daystar University in Nairobi, Kenya, and by the time the law admission came through, she had already begun. She chose to stay the course in journalism.

“Law was my first choice, no question,” she recalled, “but even in high school, I had gravitated toward writing for the school newspaper and things like that.”

That early instinct for storytelling set her on a path that would eventually lead her to Students For Liberty’s African Liberty Writing Fellowship, which she first discovered on Twitter.

Back then, in 2022, she had just graduated with her journalism degree and was struggling to decide what to do with the next phase of her professional life.

“Getting accepted [for the Fellowship] was quite an achievement for me,” she said. “I knew I could sharpen my skills further.”

The African Liberty Writing Fellowship is a competitive program that starts with a 5-week training session; not everyone who’s accepted even completes that. For those who do, what follows is a structured and grueling process of learning how to pitch ideas to an assigned SFL editor who looks at them, and either approves or rejects them. Eventually, the Fellowship’s trainers help Fellows pitch articles to (and then write articles IN) mainstream outlets throughout the continent. 

As a Fellow, Linda got to interact with peers from across Africa, publish articles on leading African media platforms, and broaden her perspective beyond Kenya to embrace Africa-wide issues. 

That broader lens proved invaluable. In 2024, Linda participated in the Finance Bill protests in Kenya. Drawing on her refined media skills, she published a story for The Economist about how young Kenyans were leading a movement for better governance. She also produced a short-form video for The Elephant explaining how young people were using customised GPTs as part of their protest efforts. The video went viral.

“Before the Fellowship, I didn’t have an eye for stories and patterns outside of Kenya that could go viral,” she said. “I won’t deny it — it was difficult at the start. The Fellowship was rigorous, and the editing process was demanding. But looking back, those processes helped refine my writing and sharpen my skills.”

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The Fellowship opened another door, too — connecting Linda with one of the world’s largest libertarian organizations, Students For Liberty.  

“I challenged my ideas on topics around capitalism and libertarian thought,” she said, adding that those sessions pushed her to engage seriously with perspectives she might not have encountered in a conventional newsroom. 

The engagement with SFL also helped her grow beyond the page. At events and speaking engagements throughout Africa, she steadily developed her voice as a public communicator while learning how to articulate complex ideas to diverse audiences with clarity and confidence.

Since completing the Fellowship, Linda has applied those skills and insights. She has:

• Investigated carbon markets in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• Covered disinformation in multiple African countries
• Written about Kenya’s economic losses due to its anti-LGBTQ+ stance
• Helped train other, younger journalists
• And she has been a speaker at events — all while continuing her work with Students For Liberty in Africa. 

In 2024, Linda received the Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling for her coverage of abortion rights in Kenya, a story that reflected the bold, boundary-pushing journalism the Fellowship helped nurture in her. This year (2026), Linda was awarded the even more prestigious Michael Elliott Reporting Grant to investigate threats to press freedom and democracy across Africa. 

Over time, as she began paying closer attention to the state of press freedom across the continent — watching as fellow journalists had their rights infringed upon, their work suppressed, and some even forced into exile — the deeper she wanted to go, and the more she wanted to help. 

“There’s a lot of repression in African countries. We’ve had violence in Tanzania and Uganda. There’s the fear of what will happen if you keep talking about certain things. But I’ll keep doing it until I can’t.”