Doreen Kessy is a Tanzanian entrepreneur and education champion, co-founder of STEM Girls Education. She is the former Chief Business Officer and Chief Operations Officer at Ubongo Learning Ltd, a social enterprise that provides educational content using cartoons.[1][2] Kessy joined Ubongo in 2014 to work towards a solution for the lack of fun educational content in Africa produced in local African languages.[3] They believed that by employing Ubongo, instructors' work with children could be supported and made much easier when the topic was taught through cartoons.[4] It is estimated that over 30 million family households in 41 countries in Africa watch and learn from Ubongo cartoons every week.[5]
Doreen Kessy | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Kessy at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos | |
| Education | Australian Studies Institute in Nairobi,Kenya |
| Alma mater | Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia |
| Occupation | Co-founder at STEM Girls Education |
| Parent(s) | Consolata Nyashalu, Godliving Kessy |
| Website | www |
Education and career
editKessy received a master's degree in Business Administration and a bachelor's degree in International Business and Economics from Liberty University in Virginia. Prior to Ubongo, Kessy worked with a variety of organizations including International Justice Mission, Wells Fargo and Smile Africa, and she designed poverty relief programs implemented in Zimbabwe and Zambia. [citation needed]
Activism
editAn Educational champion, Kessy seeks to improve and make difficult subjects in education more simple and easy to understood for African children. Ubongo teaches math and science through funny animated stories and songs. Kessy also provides the English voice of one of the characters in the Ubongo animated material, a monkey named Ngedere.[2]
Awards
editOn 10 October 2018, Kessy was among eight innovators who were awarded with African Union Education Innovation Prizes. The Innovating in Education Africa Expo 2018 took place in Dakar, Senegal.[6]
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ http://www.sheroes.co.tz/sheroes.html Archived March 8, 2019, at the Wayback Machine Revised 7 March 2019
- ^ a b "Acumen East Africa Fellows Program" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on March 30, 2019. Retrieved May 31, 2019.
- ^ "Frontpage Tanzania". finlandabroad.fi.
- ^ Thomas Ehrlich and Ernestine Fu. "Educating Kids Across Africa Through A Local Cartoon Show". Forbes.
- ^ "6 young leaders who are improving the state of the world". World Economic Forum.
- ^ "Ten Innovators Pitch for AU Education Innovation Prizes | African Union". au.int.