Jackee Budesta Batanda

Jackee Budesta Batanda is a Ugandan journalist writer and entrepreneur.

She is a senior managing partner with Success Spark Brand Limited, a communications and educational company, and a co-founder of Mastermind Africa Group Limited, a business-networking group. In 2006, Batanda worked as a peace writer at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego.

She was later awarded a research fellowship at the highly competitive Justice in Africa fellowship Programme with the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town in 2008.

Batanda was International Writer-in-Residence at the Housing Authors and Literature Denmark in 2010 where she commenced work on her novel, A Lesson in Forgetting. In 2012, she was also featured in The Times alongside 19 young women shaping the future of Africa.
That same year she was also a finalist in the 2012 Trust Women journalism Awards.
She has been writer-in-residence at Lancaster University in the UK. She was selected by the International Women's Media Foundation as the 2011–12 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow.

During the fellowship, she studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies and other Boston-area universities, and worked at The New York Times and The Boston Globe.

She is a recipient of the 2010 Uganda Young Achievers Awards in the Corporate and Professionals category and a Justice in Africa program fellowship. She has worked as a freelance journalist with the Global Press Institute, an online newswire, and was previously a senior Communications Officer with the Refugee Law Project of the Faculty of Law at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.

She is one of the 39 African writers announced as part of the Africa39 project unveiled by Rainbow, Hay Festival and Bloomsbury Publishing at the London Book Fair in April 2014.
It is a list of 39 of Sub-Saharan Africa's most promising writers under the age of 40.