LIBERPRESS AWARD 2019

At 18 years old, she won the youth talent contest at Vogue, where she would work for fifteen years as the magazine’s editor. From 1985 until 2002, Lisa worked for Condé Nast Publishers and as a freelance journalist for The Times, The Independent, The Observer, The Guardian, El País and others. She wrote thirteen books on interior design and photography. In 2002 she left behind the glamour and fashion and went to Ghana, where she created the nonprofit OAfrica (OrphanAid Africa), focused on helping children with the most critical needs (with AIDS, with serious deformities, malnourished, abandoned…). It all happened while she was volunteering at an orphanage in Ghana, where she saw the living situation of many children. The child labour, trafficking and abuse was everywhere. Lisa, arriving back home, sold her house, her company and her car and moved to Ghana. Since then she has been working to help children, by preventing them from being sent to deplorable and illegal orphanages for families without resources. She provided the Government of Ghana with a solution, and with her help, they started a massive reform project with the Department of Social Welfare and UNICEF to prevent social services institutions from replacing families (as much as possible), to improve impoverished families’ living conditions and strengthening their communities, so that they are able to take care of their own children. Lisa started the OrphanAid Africa Foster Family Community for children who need to be cared for or protected while they are waiting to be reunited with their families. It was strategically built near a poor village so that all the residents could benefit from the OA School, the health clinic and the community center. Lisa’s story and cause have been written about in more than fifty publications, like Elle, Glamour and Vanity Fair. She was recognized with the Face Africa and the Prix Femme Dynamizante de Clarins Awards in 2012. In 2014, her memoir Who Knows Tomorrow was published in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, and in 2015, in France and Spain. Ten years ago, she started working on a documentary format, where she partnered with the famous investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw, the rockstar of African journalism, on issues related to human rights, especially child trafficking. Her last work with Anas, sponsored by the European Union, was the documentary Chained by Begging, that she directed, where they discover and expose a trafficking network in Niger.