[eluser]Derek Jones[/eluser]
I would see if it makes a difference if you enter the data via a utf-8 encoded web page from a form. Say, from phpMyAdmin with utf-8 selected, or CI's deprecated-but-still-exists scaffolding. And for certain, I'd ask the server admin to disable the feature of forcing a character set, and construct proper HTML output including a meta tag defining the correct character set. At it's base, what you have is a simple problem of multiple points not communicating to each other in the same character set, but if your configuration is set properly, CI really isn't involved there.