He serves on the board of EARTH University, in Costa Rica, and of The Markup, the New York-based investigative journalism organization focused on the impact of large tech platforms and their potential for human manipulation.
In 1982, he began his journalism career at the National Concord in Lagos, a newspaper owned by aspiring political figure Moshood Abiola.
As a student, he was particularly influenced by Nigerian literary luminaries such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Cyprian Ekwensi, and other African writers including Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.
The magazine was edited by Dele Giwa, a well-known Nigerian journalist, who was killed by a mail bomb on 19 October 1986.
He eventually became United Nations Correspondent, a perch from which he began to cover Africa, making several extended trips to the continent.
In January 2004, Olojede took an opportunity to return to Africa as a correspondent to write about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, ten years later.
One story that drew particular attention was "Genocide's Child" about a mother who was raising a son conceived during a gang rape during the war.
[6] In 2005, Olojede won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his "fresh, haunting look at Rwanda a decade after rape and genocidal slaughter had ravaged the Tutsi tribe".
[8] Most famously, NEXT published the story that the president Umaru Yar'Adua was brain dead and not "returning soon from a Saudi hospital" as promised.
[9] In 2011, Dele Olojede won the John P. McNulty Prize,[10] which was established by Fellows of the Aspen Institute to reward the most innovative projects driving social change.