Tecee Boley is a public relations officer with the European Union Mission in Liberia. She was previously New Narratives Liberia’s Executive Director and was an editor of women, resources and justice projects.
Tecee reported for Okay FM radio and for FrontPage Africa newspaper and FrontPageAfricaonline.com, Liberia’s most widely read newspaper and website, and United Nations radio. In 2014 she was one of the first African journalists chosen to attend the University of Witswatersrand as a Konrad Adnaeur Stiftung scholar.
Before joining NN in 2010 Tecee had only ever left Liberia as a refugee during Liberia’s civil war in neighboring Ivory Coast. In 2018 she traveled to Philadelphia to cover the trial of Charles Taylor’s number 2 Tom Woewiyu for Liberian audiences. Woewiyu was convicted of criminal immigration fraud for lying about his wartime activities to US immigration authorities. In 2011 Tecee won a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grant to travel to World Water Week in Sweden and to report on Liberia’s troubled progress on water and sanitation. In 2012 Tecee was chosen by Thomson Reuters to attend Business and Economics Reporting training in London and by the US State Department for a reporting trip to Washington D.C. and Texas. In August 2012 she was named the International Journalism Network’s Journalist of the Month.
In 2011 Tecee was awarded Liberia’s Development Reporter of the year, one of only three women who had won national reporting awards in Liberia to that point. Her reporting on issues such as unsafe abortions, teenage prostitution, maternal health issues and foreign resource company misdeeds has prompted investigations by the United Nations and government. She has contributed to the PBS NewsHour, World Policy Journal, Reuters and US public radio.
Tecee’s drive to be a journalist came during the years she spent growing up in refugee camps during Liberia’s long civil wars. She saw violence against women and children that was never reported.
Tecee says, ‘I am already living out my dream, to broadcast voices that are rarely heard. But I don’t just want those voices to be heard, I want authorities worldwide to take action.’