06 July, 2010

Woman to Woman

I attended another very intriguing day of Highway Africa conference. We were given a task to profile someone and I was so confused because there are so many people to choose from. I finally decided to profile a very interesting woman named Nancy Booker from Kenya.

Nancy and I met during the access to information in Africa session at Eden grove this morning. I don’t know what it is that drew me to her but I looked at her and thought let me go and introduce myself. Boy am I glad that I did so. Nancy turned out to be one of the most interesting people if not the most interesting that I have met since I got here.

Nancy is currently a communications lecturer at Daystar University in Kenya. She is the fist born of five children and both her parents were civil workers. Nancy and I had a very interesting conversation during lunch and she told me so many fascinating about herself and her home country of Kenya.

She has been a lecturer for 10 years and before that she worked as a reporter for KBC which is the public broadcaster in Kenya. She also worked as content developer the nation media group in Kenya. In addition to being a lecturer Nancy I also involved in a number of NGOs. She currently sits on the board of Amani Ya juu which is a none profit organisation which helps refugee woman with skills development such as tailoring that help to empower them.

Nancy told me that she was recently in Liberia where she was helping to design a communications curriculum for one of their universities. She counts this as one the best experiences in her life because it took her out of her comfort zone and it enabled her to use her skills to help a country that is desperately in need of it.
Nancy is involved in a number of other programmes including an ABSA initiative that is helping develop a business journalism curriculum for a number of African Universities. I only spent 30 minutes with her but I was so impressed by this woman and I will definitely keep in touch with her.

1 comment:

Sungeni said...

Wow gal. I'm still to meet such impressive people