Zaina Adamu is an award-winning writer who currently serves as the Deputy Director of Communications for the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. In 2018, she founded Ghana Girl Rising, a nonprofit organization aimed at improving education access for young women in low-income communities. Before then, she was a journalist at CNN, covering the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

During her six-year tenure at CNN, she won a Peabody Award for her contribution to the network’s reporting of the Arab Spring and was selected as a Power 30 Under 30 honoree. As news editor for The Spokesman, she won an Excellence Award for her breaking news coverage of President Barack Obama’s 2008 win. In 2022, she was appointed by the European Council on Foreign Relations to the Panel of Experts for Africa where she served as a policy consultant on foreign affairs in Ghana.

Zaina served as the first Black and first female president of Harvard Alumni for Global Development from 2023-2026. She is the author of 20,000 Words: A Guide to Finding Calm in a Cluttered World and is a proud alumna of Morgan State University and Harvard.