Wesley Gibbings

Wesley Gibbings is an author, journalist, media trainer, poet, and press freedom campaigner based in Trinidad and Tobago. He is the founding President of the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers and current Vice President of the Media Institute of the Caribbean.

He is an incumbent member of the IFEX Council and also served in that capacity between 2011 and 2017, holding committee responsibilities for Audit and Finance, Governance, and as Deputy Convenor (2014 to 2017). 

He was part of the process that led to the transition of IFEX as an independent non-governmental organisation in 2014 and the hosting, in 2015, of the General Meeting and Strategy Conference in Trinidad and Tobago – the first time in a Caribbean country.

Gibbings is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Global Forum for Media Development.

His work in the promotion of freedom of expression in the Caribbean has been recognised by the US National Association of Black Journalists and the Trinidad and Tobago Publishers and Broadcasters Association.

Gibbings has co-authored a number of journalism manuals on media coverage of elections, climate change, the rights of the child, disasters, and the state of the Caribbean media. 

He writes a weekly newspaper column on Caribbean development issues, has frequently been asked to serve on regional inter-governmental committees on matters related to media development, and has served as a journalism lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.

He has lived and worked in his native Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Lucia, Guyana, and Jamaica and has travelled extensively in the wider Latin American and Caribbean region, serving on the Coordinating Committee of IFEX-LAC (2009 – 2011 and 2017 - 2019).

Gibbings’ work as a journalist, media trainer, and free expression advocate has also taken him to the Middle East, Africa, India, and the Pacific. In 2014, he led media training of journalists in Fiji for the country’s long-delayed elections. He has also been invited to serve as part of a Commonwealth Election Observer Mission to Sierra Leone on the occasion of national elections on June 24.