Kari Boto (née Blackburn) (30 March 1954 – 27 June 2007) was a BBC reporter and senior executive who specialised in Africa.
In 1992, she became editor of the BBC Marshall Plan of the Mind Trust, a "multimedia education project" for the former Soviet republics.
[8] Blackburn died on 27 June 2007; she drowned in the North Sea seaport of Felixstowe, Suffolk, England, close to her home in Ipswich.
[6] According to Boto, a Ugandan consultant gynaecologist at Ipswich Hospital,[12] Blackburn suffered from "mental and physical illness" after assuming her position at BBC World Service Trust and felt "isolated and under-supported".
[6] On news of her suicide, hundreds of people working for the BBC World Service and BBC Newsgathering signed a petition demanding an independent inquiry into the circumstances leading up to her death and the role that the work environment may have played in her depression; the inquiry was undertaken by the Deputy Director General's head of HR.