I am passionate about creating inclusive, sustainable cities where people’s interactions with their natural and built environments are guided by human-centered design. Currently, I lead a team focused on strengthening governance and citizen engagement processes within East Africa—applying behavior-change strategies and developing toolkits to empower different stakeholders, and helping them to apply behavioral science to strengthen citizen participation. Our penultimate aim is to make citizens feel empowered to engage with governance processes and shape policies that impact their lives.

In the current implementation phase, I am focused on guiding and delivering multi-country behavioral-science projects within governance, overseeing the entire project planning and execution, and embedding quality across all phases. To highlight one of the most significant programs, the Community Messaging and Civic Participation Program: A multi-country, multi-year (a decade) initiative to bridge applied behavioral science with civil-society strategies for enhanced citizen engagement.

Before my current role, I worked with different teams focused on health, education, environment, financial inclusion, agriculture, governance, and energy sector projects. I supported the successful delivery of these projects by developing behavior profiles, research methods and scoping different research themes. This allowed the teams to develop behavioral interventions to tackle highlighted barriers, testing the interventions before upscaling.

Before joining Busara, I was part of different teams that successfully drafted development and master plans, including the Mukuru Health Impact Assessment (at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development), Lamu County Spatial plan (at Urban and Regional Planning firm), and the University of Nairobi Master Plan (at the University of Nairobi). I have an academic background in Urban planning with a Masters from the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Both my professional and academic backgrounds led me to Busara, where I actively seek to contribute to projects that will lead to the elimination of poverty and better standards of living for communities living in the Global South.

Profiles: LinkedIn

Languages Spoken: English, Swahili, Luo.