A Nigerian social entrepreneur, Ms. Misan Rewane will this week feature on African Voices, a magazine programme powered by Globacom Nigeria Limited on the Cable News Network (CNN) alongside two other notable change agents.
The other change agents are a Tanzanian girls’ advocate, Ms. Rebecca Gyumi and the Founder of Fundi Bots, Solomon King Benge from Kampala, Uganda, both of whom have been impacting their communities through education and innovation.
This was contained in a statement from the Globacom Corporate Communication Office yesterday, describingRewane as a social entrepreneur, who is equipping young adults with the skills to build careers of their choices.
The statement profiled Rewane as the Chief Executive Officer of West Africa Vocational Education (WAVE) with 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.
In the case of Gyumi, the statement said she “is the Founder & Executive Director at Msichana Initiative, plans 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.
“Gyumi, a lawyer by profession, is respected for a landmark case on child marriages which she won consequent upon a petition she filed at the High Court of Tanzania.”
Specifically, the statement noted that Gyumi had challenged the Tanzania Marriage Act, 1971, which legalised marriage by adolescent girls from the age of 14.
It added that Gyumi’s 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.”
The statement said Benge, who founded Fundi Bots, employed 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.
“An engineer by training, Benge deploys science through robots to drive home the possibility of new innovations in Uganda,” the statement explained.
