Meet our people: Daisy Rono

Daisy is our Marketing & Communications Manager at OUP East Africa (OUPEA), and along with the Canadian government, we recently sponsored her to represent Kenya in the Global Youth Leaders (GYL) program in Canada.

“I was overwhelmed when I learnt that I was a candidate for GYL. This was a humbling moment for me, I did not know what to expect but I was determined to learn everything I had at my disposal. It was the proudest moment of my life and being offered such an opportunity made a big difference to me; my life as a youth leader was changed.

Recent world events and youth movements have demonstrated the ability, energy, and creativity of young people to generate solutions to some of the major challenges of our time. There is a growing need to help youth leaders increase their capacity to catalyze innovation and change in organizations and communities around the world.

As a GYL candidate, I got the rare opportunity to meet young leaders from all over the world and they each have sincere passion for leadership and progression and with limited resources they are transforming their local communities.

Kofi partnered with a friend to lease idle land from farmers in their poor community in Ghana, in order to create employment for young people and tackle a food shortage, while 21-year-old Syrian student Maya has developed an art therapy project to help women in her country find international markets through social media. 24 year-old-Karen from Mexico works to protect young girls from underprivileged communities from being targeted by human traffickers, and 25-year-old Muzh from Afghanistan has a project to support teachers in areas controlled by the Taliban. I gave her examples of what we are doing at OUPEA with our teacher workshops, which she drew inspiration from and asked for my help to set up a training program.

These were just among some of the projects that the GYL candidates were running in their communities alongside their day jobs. This was a class of people who believed they had more to offer—we were all passionate to become better leaders in our organizations and communities.
 
By the end of the program, I grew to understand myself and learnt why it’s important to look at the assets a group has and build on them. From a professional point of view, I learnt how to best facilitate adult learning such as teachers workshops, and how I could support OUP sponsored youth programs in secondary schools. The opportunity to be involved in GYL has shown me just how much power I have to change the world around me, and how I can help others to harness their power to help build a better world for us all.”