Ashley Okwuosa

I am a journalist, researcher, and editor based in Toronto. My stories on immigration, education, gender, and fashion have been published in The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, WNYC, Quartz, The Business of Fashion, and others. I'm a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School where I was a recipient of the African Pulitzer fellowship. From 2019 - 2020, I was a grantee at The Brown Institute for Media Innovation where I helped build a database of maternal health interventions implemented in Nigeria over the last 30 years. You can find it here. 


Pulitzer Center •

Two Years Later, has the NEMCHIC Initiative Reduced Maternal Deaths in Nigeria?

Dr. Shuaib, the executive director of Nigeria’s healthcare development agency, was serious about the state of maternal health, and wanted everyone to know. So he called a press conference and declared a state of emergency. “Having noted the high rate of maternal, newborn and under-five child mortality, and the insufficiency of our current efforts to reverse the trend, I hereby declare a state of public health concern on maternal, newborn, and child deaths occurring at the primary healthcare com
TVO.org •

‘For us, by us’: How a new Caribbean exhibition is changing the AGO

Kenneth Montague was 10 years old when he first saw pictures from the Harlem Renaissance. A child of Jamaican immigrants in Windsor, he’d visited the Detroit Institute of Arts and been moved by the images of Black people in their Sunday best lounging in Harlem brownstones or sitting in Cadillacs. “It was definitely an eye-opener,” says Montague, who had before that seen mostly images that reflected negative stereotypes about people who looked like him.
TVO.org •

‘A very long journey’: Another challenge for newcomers — finding affordable housing

Tetiana Karbovanets and her family have moved three times in the past five years. Karbovanets, who works as an immigration consultant, moved with her husband and son from Ukraine, in 2016, as part of Canada’s express-entry program for skilled workers. The family arrived in June and rushed to find suitable housing in Toronto. After securing a short-term rental, they moved into an apartment, where they stayed for two and a half years. But when they started looking into buying a house, they realiz
TVO.org •

Anatomy of an outbreak: How COVID-19 overran this Ontario prison

On April 14, 2020, employees at Brampton’s Ontario Correctional Institute received a memo informing them that a co-worker had tested positive for COVID-19. “It is important to note that the individual did not experience symptoms while at work,” wrote Mark Parisotto, director of the central region for the Ministry of the Solicitor General’s Institutional Services Division. “The employee remains in self-isolation and is following protocols recommended by health authorities.” Employees were advise
The Business of Fashion •

African Entrepreneurs Are Banking on ‘A-Beauty’

African beauty doesn’t stop with shea butter, says Linda Gieskes-Mwamba. The beauty entrepreneur who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and raised between Brussels and Johannesburg has always been a fan of the fat extracted from the nut of the African shea tree. Growing up in a part of Central Africa where it wasn’t abundant, she was always sure to request some from anyone coming from West Africa.
TVO.org •

Kids in crisis: Inside Ontario’s overloaded mental-health system

About two years ago, Suzanne noticed that her daughter was getting thinner and thinner. The Ottawa resident suspected that her daughter, then 14, had developed bulimia. By December 2019, she was struggling to get out of bed and looked gravely ill. Her parents were worried about her heart: purging — a symptom of bulimia that can involve self-induced vomiting, laxative misuse, and other behaviours — can cause imbalances of the electrolytes that help maintain a regular heart rhythm. In January 202
TVO.org •

‘They’re at risk’: How COVID-19 is affecting health-care workers of colour

At work, Jean-Géthro Joseph was known as the one who was always willing to offer help when needed and was fond of telling his co-workers about his children’s latest achievements. He was also a major presence in his community: before his daughter-in-law, Daphney Attis-Joseph, met his son Clifford, her parents already knew Joseph. When they’d moved from Haiti to Ottawa in the early ’90s, not too long after Joseph had made the same trip, he’d been there to help them settle in.
TVO.org •

How North America’s first Black female publisher saw the ‘road to independence’

A year after Mary Ann Shadd left the United States and settled in Windsor, the educator, newspaper publisher, and abolitionist released her manifesto “A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West.” Written two years after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the document encouraged African-Americans who had been freed from or escaped slavery to migrate to Canada West, now part of present-day Ontario. It extolled the virtues of the region: fertile land and economic and educational opportunities equa
TVO.org •

‘In search of a more peaceful environment’: Newcomers leave the GTA for new homes up north

When Manikantan Chandrasekharan arrived in Mississauga from Bangalore last July, he did not realize that he would become one of 118,000 newcomers to settle in the Greater Toronto Area that year. For Chandrasekharan, Mississauga seemed like the most sensible place for him, his wife, and his two children to make a home. As a newly minted permanent resident, Chandrasekharan was free to move to any city in any province across the country; he chose Mississauga because it was home to friends who h
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