If you’re wondering where Isha Sesay is now, here’s the short answer. She left CNN in August 2018 after 13 years, wrote a book about the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls, and since March 2021 she’s been CEO of Areya Media, the company behind OkayAfrica and Okayplayer. She’s also a mother to a toddler, and this summer she finally spoke about why she walked away from the most visible job in African news.
The longer version is better. It’s also got a Sierra Leone thread running through it that most write ups skip.
What Is Isha Sesay Doing Now?
The simplest way to put it: she went from reading the news to running a media company. In June 2026 she sat down with her former colleague Larry Madowo for a CNN conversation about leaving her high profile job, becoming a mother on her own in her 40s, and stepping into the CEO chair.
Areya Media is the parent of OkayAfrica, Okayplayer and OkayShop. It’s a digital platform built around Black culture and the African diaspora, and it makes podcasts, events and video as well as articles.
As for where she lives, I couldn’t find anything confirmed, and she doesn’t seem to broadcast it. I’d rather tell you that than guess.
Is Isha Sesay Sierra Leonean?
Yes, and I think this is the bit people get slightly wrong. She was born in London in 1976 to Temne parents from Sierra Leone, but she was taken back to Freetown at around seven and spent most of her childhood there. She went to Fourah Bay College School and then St Joseph’s Secondary School.
Picture what that childhood sounds like. Rain hammering tin roofs so loudly you stop trying to talk. Generators humming after dark. The harmattan haze in the dry season, when everything looks like it’s been dusted with flour and your lips crack by January.
Her father died in 1988, when she was still a child. Then she went off to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study English, and as far as I’m aware she worked in a bar to get through it.
So when the headlines call her “British Sierra Leonean”, both halves are true. But if you ask me which half did the shaping, I’d say Freetown.
Who Is Kadi Sesay, and Why Does She Matter to This Story?
You can’t write about Isha Sesay without her mother. Dr Kadi Sesay was a lecturer at Fourah Bay College for around 20 years, eventually heading the English department. Later she became a government minister, serving as Sierra Leone’s Minister of Trade and Industry from 2002 to 2007, and she ran as the Sierra Leone People’s Party vice presidential candidate, which made her the first woman to do so in the country’s history.
Think about that for a second. A girl grows up watching her mother stand in rooms that women weren’t expected to stand in. Of course she ends up doing what Isha did.
In December 2016 Kadi suffered a stroke. Isha has said it left her mother in a semi vegetative state and that she looked after her for nine years. Kadi Sesay died in 2025, at 76, according to local reports.
From Cambridge to CNN: How She Got There
Her route into television wasn’t glamorous. She began as an unpaid intern on the BBC talk show Kilroy, then got hired, then spent more than three years anchoring at Sky Sports News. In November 2005 she joined CNN International.
Over the next 13 years she anchored shows including International Desk and CNN Newsroom, and she led much of the network’s Africa coverage. If you watched CNN anywhere in West Africa in that period, you saw her face.
I’ll be honest, there’s a reason people still call her “the girl from CNN”. For a generation of Africans, she was one of very few presenters on international television who sounded like she’d actually been to the places she was reporting from.
Why Did Isha Sesay Leave CNN?
She announced her departure on 2 August 2018. For years she didn’t say why. The reason has surfaced only recently, in a CNN piece from July 2026 that says she’d never publicly explained it until now.
From what’s been reported, caring for her mother was central to it. That fits the timeline too, since the stroke came in late 2016.
I should say that I’m relying on reporting of her own words here, not on anything I’ve heard first hand. But it sounds right to me. Anyone who’s looked after a parent who’s seriously ill knows no job survives that unchanged.
Beneath the Tamarind Tree: The Book That Defined Her Post CNN Years
On the night of 14 April 2014, Boko Haram took 276 schoolgirls from their school in Chibok, in north eastern Nigeria. Isha led the CNN team whose coverage won a Peabody Award in 2014.
In July 2019 she published Beneath the Tamarind Tree, her account of the abduction, the captivity and the girls’ escapes. Her publisher says she was the only journalist to accompany 21 of the released girls on their journey home.
NPR’s review called her a briskly opinionated writer, and noted that the book argues the Nigerian government failed the girls, and that so did the rest of us. Not every reader loved it, mind. Some reviewers felt she was too present in her own story. That’s a fair criticism, though I’d argue a first book from a broadcaster was always going to sound like her.
Around the same time she was building a foundation called W.E., launched in 2014 and focused on girls and women. It’s worth knowing about, even if it gets less press than the CNN years.
Isha Sesay as CEO of Areya Media
In March 2021 she became the first woman to lead what was then OkayMedia. She renamed it Areya, which means sunshine in Yoruba, and she’s said the word felt right for where the company had been and where she wanted to take it.
Since then the company’s put out a Webby Award winning podcast, The Almanac of Rap, plus shows like Afrobeats Intelligence, hosted by the Nigerian journalist Joey Akan, and Bird’s Eye View with Seun Kuti.
What I find interesting is the strategy. Plenty of international companies are pulling back from Africa. Isha’s said the opposite: she told BusinessDay, “I’m playing a long term game with Africa”, and she links that to growing up in Sierra Leone and the UK.
Do I think that’s a bit of a brand line? A little. But the company’s still going, and she’s still the boss, so it’s not nothing.
Isha Sesay’s Daughter and Life as a Single Mother
In January 2023, after two unsuccessful rounds of IVF, she announced that she was pregnant at 46. Her daughter was born the following month. The name, Naimah Yasmine Kadi Sesay, carries her grandmother’s name in the middle.
She’s said that some people congratulated her and others criticised her choice to be a single mother. Frankly, I think that second group should mind its own business.
She’s also said her mother’s stroke made her realise how much family bonds matter. It’s one of the more honest things I’ve read from a public figure, because it doesn’t pretend the decision was easy or tidy.
Is Isha Sesay Really a Powerful Voice for Sierra Leone?
Here’s my honest take, and you can disagree. I couldn’t find any official role she holds in Sierra Leone, and she doesn’t appear to wear the “voice for Sierra Leone” label herself. That’s the headline’s framing, not hers.
What she does is quieter. She’s one of the most recognisable people on earth with Sierra Leonean roots, and she uses the platform to push African stories further than they’d otherwise go.
I’d love to see more of Sierra Leone itself in that coverage. That’s a wish, not a report on what Areya publishes. Freetown has plenty of stories that rarely reach anyone outside the country.
Still, here’s the line I’d screenshot: you don’t have to live in a country to carry it; you just have to refuse to let it be forgotten.
Don’t Mix Her Up With Another Isha Sesay
Quick warning, because I nearly did this myself. Another Isha Sesay writes about expat life as the editor in chief of a publication called Escape Artist, and her bio says she’s based in Spain. As far as I can tell from the bios, she’s a different person from the former CNN anchor.
If you’re searching for the CNN Isha, double check the byline before you share something.
So, Where Is She Today?
Running a media company, raising a small girl, and still telling stories about Africa, just not from an anchor desk.
If you want to hear her yourself, start with the Larry Madowo conversation linked above. Then read Beneath the Tamarind Tree, if you can handle it.
Honestly, I think leaving CNN looks less like walking away from something and more like choosing what to carry. Most of us never get that choice, and she took it.
