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Ruto vs The Standard: What Kenya’s Press Freedom Crisis Means for Every Communicator on the Continent
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People of Comms
Samuel Karanja – Regional Director, Africa at Burson
Burson, Regional Director -Africa
🇰🇪 Kenya

"Samuel is not the kind of communicator who manages campaigns. He is the kind who manages entire markets, across borders, across crises, across languages, across cultures, for clients who cannot afford to get it wrong, and he has been doing it for over two decades."

About

Every week, we take a moment to put a spotlight on the communications professionals shaping the industry across Africa. This week, we celebrate Samuel C. Karanja, and if you are serious about communications on this continent, this is a career worth studying.

Samuel is not the kind of communicator who manages campaigns. He is the kind who manages entire markets, across borders, across crises, across languages, across cultures, for clients who cannot afford to get it wrong, and he has been doing it for over two decades.

He currently serves as Regional Director, Africa at Burson, the global communications firm formed through the merger of BCW and Hill+Knowlton Strategies. His remit spans Sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Ocean Islands, and the Maghreb, covering Public Affairs, Integrated Communications, Crisis Preparedness and Management, and Financial Communications.

He also co-leads Media, Crisis, and Leadership training for C-Suite executives across the continent. The scale of that brief tells you everything about the level of trust he has earned.

Look at where he has come from, and the picture becomes even clearer. Samuel spent over thirteen years at Hill+Knowlton Strategies, rising from Managing Director to Executive Director to Regional Director, leading East Africa’s Financial Communications practice, building H+K’s Tanzania office from scratch, and serving as the firm’s crisis communications lead counsel for the region.

Before that, he ran PR across Airtel Africa’s fifteen markets at Ogilvy, one of the most complex multi-market mandates on the continent at the time, and before that, his earliest work at Uchumi Supermarkets and IMC Africa included helping craft the communication strategy for ICDC Investments’ 2001 secondary share issue, a campaign that closed at 60% subscription. He has been delivering since the beginning.

Away from client work, Samuel serves as an Executive Committee Member of the Public Relations Society of Kenya.

This week, Comms Arena celebrates Samuel Karanja. A career that has set the standard for what African communications leadership looks like and continues to raise it.