Latest News(April, 2011)
- My "Accra Daily Photo" blog is one of ten blogs in Ghana that has won a TRIPBASE "best travel blog" in Ghana.
This is what the award states:
The Tripbase Travel award is only given to the blogs that are the top of their respective class and are some of the best in the field. The nominees are chosen by our team of travel experts that go out to scour the internet for the best blogs they can find. That select group is then short-listed via a rigorous selection process, taking in factors like how informative the blog is, the overall writing style, the actual blog appearance and how well that blog performs in its given category when compared and contrasted to other, similar blogs. The award is a mark of prestige which is only afforded to the blogs that score highly when our judges review them for selection. The award is a sign that a blog succeeds greatly at what it does and surpasses all expectations, thereby indicating it as a veritable bastion of quality and information.
Issues with the award notwithstanding, thanks for the recogition--and to all those who won it, too!
Eccentricity Unlimited!
Born in the West African state of Ghana in 1977, Emmanuel.K.Bensah Jr is an 1988 European Council of International Schools Award for “International Understanding” winner.
He has been working as a Communications Officer for the East-Legon-based Third World Network-Africa—an international NGO working on issues of international development, gender, mining and the extractive sector—since 2004, when he returned home from Belgium after 23.5 years in that country.
Before TWN-Africa, he worked as a programme assistant intern/information officer for the Brussels-based NGO, International Coalition for Development Action(ICDA), from January 2001 to July 2004.
He has also worked for almost two years as a Writing Center tutor for English, History, and Politics courses at Vesalius College, Brussels, where he graduated from in December 2000 with a B.A. in International Affairs & History; and where he also studied for a minor in Communication Studies, which included courses in Political Communication; Writing for the Media and International Role of the News Media.
Emmanuel graduated in 2003 from Universite Libre de Bruxelles with a “grande distinction” for his M.A. in International Politics dissertation, entitled Is There No Alternative? Can ECOWAS & ASEAN Regionalism Respond to the West's Push for Global Trade Liberalisation?"
Since 2001, his passion for the subject has grown thanks to his wide reading of the subject. He owns a website called "Critiquing Regionalism" (http://www.critiquing-regionalism.org), which used to be called RegionsWatch. Established in 2004 as an initiative to respond to the dearth of knowledge on GLOBAL regional integration initiatives (http://regionswatch.tripod.com/index.htm and http://regionswatch.blogspot.com) worldwide, this particular blog features regional integration initiatives on MERCOSUR/EU/Africa/Asia and many others.
In June 2007 (http://ekbensahinghana.blogspot.com/2009/01/unbearable-lightness-of-being-west.html) Ghana’s Radio Gold asked him to partake in a discussion on the Youth and the promotion of regional integration in their flagship “PLATFORM AFRICA” show.
Encouraged by social networking tool Facebook and the news of Libyan leader Qaddafi as AU Chairman for the period of 2009-2010, he decided to set up a Facebook group entitled "I am Proud African Union citizen" (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=70453161507&ref=ts), and immediately followed it up by setting up a blog of the same name, which he launched in April 2009 (http://african-union-citizen.blogspot.com/). He considers it the sister blog of the critiquing-regionalism.org site, and is geared towards AU discussions and reflections.
In 2009, in his capacity as a Do More Talk Less Ambassador of the 42nd Generation—an NGO that promotes and discusses Pan-Africanism--he gave lectures on the role of regional integration in facilitating a Pan-African identity.
Truth be told, Emmanuel started to become a thorn in policymaker's decisions when he represented, respectively,Argentina at The Hague International Model United Nations (THIMUN) in 1994, and Luxemburg at Model Nato the same year.
He earned a reputation at university for asking very candid, but uncomfortable questions at important public meetings, which perhaps paved the way for his NGO work, which he has been actively pursuing since 2001. He has a healthy skepticism of any international institution -- except the UN, which he believes over and above all would have to be invented if it did not exist.
His special areas of interest are diplomatic history (1815-1914); the United Nations; international development; and global regional integration, with a focus on peace and security. He has 10 years of experience creating, writing material for, and updating websites.
An active blogger, Emmanuel owns and maintains no less than five active blogs (“Reflecting the Eccentric World of E.K.Bensah II”; “Trials & Tribulations of a Freshly-Arrived Denizen…of Ghana; Accra Daily Photo”; “Critiquing Regionalism”; “African Union Citizen”; “From Technology in Tunis…to a Wireless WSIS”.) American academic Rebekah Hurt wrote a biography of his life as expressed through his blogs in 2007, describing Emmanuel’s blogging thus:
“West African blogs such as those created by the prolific E.K. Bensah II exemplify the medium of blogs as a source of serious literary and historical information worthy of scholarly examination, and Bensah’s particular use of his blogs proves the bloggosphere[sic] as a site of ongoing transformation where new concepts of selves and communities are continually being formulated and reformulated.”
For two years, Emmanuel dabbled with technology journalism --thanks to his former boss and mentor Mr.Kwasi Gyan-Apenteng. In that endeavour, Emmanuel regularly analyzed trends in technology through his weekly column for the erstwhile “Sunday World” newspaper, now “Weekend World”, which he had been writing since November 2007.
In 2009, he was appointed ICT/Technology judge for the 14th Ghana Journalists Award Media Awards Committee and appointed secretary for the three months of evaluation of Ghanaian journalist’s work.
His Top 5 secrets of success are: 1. stay focused; 2. be prayerful; 3. remain humble; 4. think of whence you came, where you are going and to whom you must account; 5. be compassionate.
Emmanuel believes in a world where regional economic communities, such as the EU and the African Union assume greater importance and leverage at multilateral fora for the benefit of humanity.
He is inspired by crime series like 'Inspector Morse', 'The X-files', and sitcoms such as 'Frasier'.
Welcome to my world!
Emmanuel K Bensah Jr
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*this page is under construction* (last update: Tuesday 14 June, 2011) | 
