Photo-Activist Boniface Mwangi Named in The Top 30 Most Inspirational Young People in Africa

Africa’s youth portal, Youth Village Africa, has just released a list of the top young people doing remarkable work in their countries to facilitate development in the lives of people in their communities and throughout the continent.

Youth Village Africa, is an initiative founded and owned by 24 year old Social Entrepreneur and Global Change Maker, Bruce Dube. This initiative focuses extensively on facilitating better access to developmental information across Africa with core focus on African youth.

This year’s list identifies young Africans, mostly below 30 years of age, who are prominent in their areas of activism or fields of expertise and are coming up with innovative ways to address some of the challenges faced by the continent. Among these are 6 Kenyans with photo-activist Boniface Mwangi and blogger Ory Okolloh leading the pack.

Here are their profiles;

Boniface Mwangi is an award winning Kenyan photographer and photo-activist. Boniface is the Project Director of Picha Mtaani, which is a mobile photo exhibition held in towns across Kenya, showcasing photographs of the post-election violence that rocked various parts of the country in 2007/08. Picha Mtaani has reached over 500,000 individuals and plans to develop an online platform that will use photography as a catalyst for social change across East Africa. Boniface has worked as a photojournalist for the Standard, and has worked as a freelancer for Bloomberg, the AFP, Reuters, the Boston Globe, as well as a number of other media outlets. He holds a Diploma in Print Journalism from the East African School of Journalism, and has been recognized as a TED Fellow and twice as the CNN Multichoice Africa Photojournalist of the Year.

Ory Okolloh a Kenyan activist, lawyer, and blogger. She is currently a Policy Manager for Africa with Google. In 2006 she co-founded the parliamentary watchdog site Mzalendo (Patriot). The site sought to increase government accountability by systematically recording bills, speeches, MPs, standing orders, etc. She helped Kenya create Ushahidi (Witness) website in due to the violence that was taking place in 2007. The website was used to record and report any reports on violence by using text messages and Google maps. This Technology is now been adapted in a number of countries. Ory Okolloh also worked as a legal consultant for NGOs and has worked at Covington and Burling, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, and the World Bank in the past. She obtained an undergraduate degree in Political science from University of Pittsburgh and Graduated from Harvard Law School in 2005.

The other great young minds include;

Evans Wadongo: an engineer, the Executive Director and Chairman of SDFA-Kenya, and one of CNN’s top ten heroes of 2010.

Kariuki Gathitu: founder MPAYER; a mobile money management system

Eddy Gicheru Oketch: founder and Trustee of PAD (www.padinst.org); a youth leadership, peace-building and enterprise incubator that established youth economic empowerment projects and develop African Peace Ambassadors in the continent.

Richard Turere: the innovator behind ‘Lion Lights’ which are flashing lights set up around a perimeter facing outwards; which are used to scare away lions. ‘Lion Lights’ prevent night attacks by lions on his family’s cattle herd in Kitengela.

HERE are the rest of the young people on the list.