Roberto Savio is a journalist born in Rome but of Argentinean nationality. He studied Economics at the University of Parma, with further courses in Development Economics, Art History and International Law. His career began as a research assistant in International Law, and later turned to journalism.

He worked for the Italian daily newspaper Il Popolo and as director of journalistic services for Latin America at RAI, where he won awards for his documentaries, including the Saint-Vincent Prize for Journalism, the most prestigious in Italy.

In the 1960s, Savio developed a strong sensitivity towards the huge information gap that characterised relations between countries in the North and South of the world, especially in Latin America. This conviction led him, together with the Argentine journalist Pablo Piacentini, to found the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency in 1964, initially called the Roman Press Agency. The aim was to give space to Latin American exiles in Europe so that they could report on the situation in their countries. Formally founded at the Schloss Eichholz conference centre of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, IPS was conceived as a non-profit cooperative of journalists, with two-thirds of its members coming from the Global South. The main objective of IPS, expressed through the mission ‘to give a voice to the voiceless’, was to represent the rights and perspectives of the poorest countries and to promote a new information order.

In the 1970s and 1980s, IPS grew rapidly and became an important instrument for South-South cooperation and South-North information exchange. Thanks to Savio's leadership, the agency obtained consultative NGO status (Category I) with the UN ECOSOC, and established itself as a key information service for global civil society, growing to 30,000 NGO subscribers and millions of online readers. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, IPS moved towards coverage of globalisation, with the aim of giving greater representation to the issues of developing countries.

During Savio's editorship, IPS received numerous awards, including the award from the Institute of Population in Washington as the ‘most conscientious news service’ for nine consecutive years in the 1990s, and the FAO's A.H. Boerma Journalism Award in 1997, for its contribution to the coverage of sustainable agriculture and rural development in over 100 countries. In 1985, Savio established the International Journalism Award to honour journalists who risk their lives to expose human rights violations, and in 1991, this award was expanded and renamed the International Achievement Award to reflect the new post-Cold War global challenges.

In 2008, he founded *Other News, an alternative news service aimed at providing information excluded from the mainstream commercial media. This online service publishes reports, analyses and opinions from research centres and think tanks, to offer readers perspectives other than the mainstream.

Other initiatives: National Information Systems Network (ASIN) for Latin America and the Caribbean; Agencia Latinoamericana de Servicios Especiales de Información (ALASEI) sponsored by UNESCO; Women's Feature Service to give voice to women's issues in developing countries; Technological Information Promotion System (TIPS), a UN programme to promote technological and commercial cooperation between developing countries. In the field of communication for the advancement of women; WINNER, a training project for small and medium-sized women entrepreneurs in developing countries.

She has worked with numerous UN agencies, including UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, UNICEF, UNFPA and UNITAR. He also contributed to the development of information exchange programmes between regions, such as between ALASEI and the Organisation of Asian News Agencies (OANA), and between the Pan African News Agency (PANA) and the Federation of Arab News Agencies (FANA). He was instrumental in putting the concept of a fee for the Press Bulletin Service for Development on the agenda of the UNESCO MacBride Commission.

Throughout his career, he has received several international awards, including the Hiroshima Peace Award and the Joan Gomis Memorial for peace journalism in 2013, the Salvador Allende Award at the Latin American Film Festival in Trieste in 2016, and a special diploma from the Presidency of Chile for his support for human rights during the Chilean dictatorship. In 2021, he was appointed Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella, and received an honorary degree in Political Science from the United Nations Peace University.

Parallel to his journalistic career, he has maintained a strong commitment to peace, sustainability and global governance. He has been president of various organisations, such as Alliance for a New Humanity, founded with Deepak Chopra and Balthazar Garzon, and deputy director of the scientific council of the New Policy Forum, created by Mikhail Gorbachev. He is also actively engaged as a speaker at numerous international conferences and in the production of articles and essays on social and climate justice.

Demonstrating an unwavering dedication to inclusive global information, disseminating news from the Global South and promoting an informed and engaged civil society, it has contributed to making information a right for all, maintaining a vision of a fairer and more inclusive world and promoting global participation on critical issues such as social justice, climate change and peace.