Fitsum Mehari – NexGen Global Forum

Fitsum Mehari is a public relations and communications practitioner who has worked, both, in an internship and professional capacities in the field. His policy research background focused on the activities of regional (Pan African) forums and institutions. His more recent policy research interests focus on the political economy relations between China and Africa. Specifically, these interests focus on trade, energy resources and environment sustainability. He holds a BA degree in Foreign Languages and Literature 2010 from Addis Ababa University (AAU), and a BA in Economics-Political Science 2019 from Columbia University.

​For his undergraduate thesis at AAU, he wrote a policy research paper on donor-NGO communications. The paper was informed by findings from a survey study he conducted on the activities of a not for profit Pan African institute, the African Child Policy Forum, advocating for child rights. After graduation, he took up a six-month internship at the Directorate of Information and Communications of the African Union Commission, during the politically significant period of the Arab Spring. He then worked as a research assistant for a senior economist from the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Shortly after, he worked in a communications office of a US-Ethiopia based media production company for four years. While there he worked on many of the company’s successful projects, and one of which, a feature film (Difret ’14), won awards in the prestigious Sundance and Berlin film festivals.

In 2016, owing to personal experiences, he embarked on a path of career change. As such, he reenrolled at Columbia University to study for his second bachelors in Economics-Political Science. While there he conducted independent research on Sino-African relations under the supervision of a senior faculty with expertise on Chinese foreign policy, and research on energy markets and policies of select African countries for his economics senior seminar. Currently he is pursuing a dual MA degree in International Affairs at Tsinghua University Beijing, China (2019-20) and Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) Washington, DC (2020-21).