Glo-sponsored African Voiceshosts Change Agents From Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda

THE 30-minute Globacom-sponsored magazine programme on the Cable News Network, CNN, tagged African Voices, will this week play host to three notable African change agents who have been impacting their communities through education and innovation.

According to the précis of the programme, the trio are, Misan Rewane, a social entrepreneur from Nigeria, Rebeca Gyumi, girls’ advocate from Tanzania; and Solomon King Benge, the founder of Fundi bots from Kampala, Uganda.

Rewane, a Harvardtrained vocational expert and an accomplished social entrepreneur, is equipping young adults with the skills to build careers of their choices.

He is the Chief Executive Officer of WAVE (West Africa Vocational Education). He has a resolve to ameliorate the incidence of youth unemployment in Nigeria, by teaching young people the skills required of them to be integrated into the country’s job market and subsequently, maintain successful careers in their chosen fields of human endeavour.

Gyumi is a lawyer by calling, and is the Founder & Executive Director at Msichana Initiative; a Tanzanian NGO, which aims to empower the girl-child through education, while addressing key challenges, which limit girls’ rights to education. She has equally worked for over eight years with Femina, a youth focused organisation, as a TV personality. She is a youth advocate and girls’ rights activist.

The activist Gyumi is respected for a milestone case on child marriages, which she won consequent upon a petition, she filed at the High Court of Tanzania. She had challenged the Tanzania Marriage Act, 1971 which legalises marriage by adolescent girls from the age of 14.

Her victory on the case led to the decision to raise the minimum age of marriage to 18 for both Tanzanian boys and girls. This, among other achievements culminated in the award of the UN Human Rights Prize to her.

In Uganda, Fundi Bots founded by Benge, a robots engineer, “employs robotics training within and outside African schools to create and inspire a new generation of students and innovators who are better prepared for careers in the technology sector and who can become change-makers in their communities.”