Nina Chung – Founder/President, divides her time between Kenya and Canada. She mentors the Kenyan staff in collaboration with the Executive Team and manages the liaison with the Canadian board of directors. She is responsible for Kenyan and international outreach for funding, resource mobilization and partnership development. As a Catholic working in a mixed Christian/Muslim society, she has faced the challenges of living her faith while respecting the diversity in the community. The Elimu team welcomes children and youth from all faith and cultural backgrounds into their education and skills development programmes, improving access to education and skills to guide them towards stronger more stable livelihoods than their parents have known. Elimu also engages the parents offering them financial literacy and entrepreneurship training to help them identify and run small home-based businesses that can improve household incomes. Malindi, where Elimu is based, is semi-rural and many beneficiaries come from surrounding villages. In rural Kenya, it is still very common for poor families to choose to educate their boys over girls. When a girl is married, she moves to her husband’s community and this is seen as a ‘loss’ to the family. The groom’s family is required to pay a “bride price” which is intended as a means for her family to recover some of that value. Marriages are often pre-arranged by the parents after their daughters have completed Gr. 8 generally affecting girls ranging from 14-16 years, but even as young as nine. Multiple wives for one man is also common. The Elimu Girls sewing project takes such girls into a sewing programme where they gain the skills they need to run their own sewing business and gifts them with a sewing machine upon graduation. As sewing artisans, these young entrepreneurs gain income and respect from their community and find their voice.

Nina will share her experiences as a Canadian volunteering in Kenya from 2004-2006 and the inspiration that led her to step into the gap she saw around her of children trying to get a decent education in a country where school is not yet free! In the extravert African lifestyle, she found new lively expressions of faith and her own spirituality growing as she lived it out in a community greatly challenged by socio-economic pressures that keep families locked into the cycle of poverty. Over the last 20 years, she has seen how a child can blossom and thrive, affecting the whole family, and even the community, when at least one person in their life believes in them. Living out her Catholic faith in Kenya has renewed her and increased her confidence in actively living her beliefs and sharing her values with people from other denominations and creeds. Nina will also describe how Elimu makes safe spaces for Muslim children and parents in their programs and on staff within their Catholic faith-inspired setting.

In 2004, Nina left a successful marketing consulting partnership in Ottawa to volunteer in Kenya. During that time, she began assisting children with education and entrepreneurship and established Elimu to make her projects sustainable. Nina has over 30 years’ experience in project management, partnership development, international marketing and business strategy planning. She worked over 14 years marketing international travel and cultural exchange programs for youth and students. In 1996, she started a successful marketing consulting firm in Ottawa. She has lived and worked in a variety of cultural environments. Nina holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Western Ontario, Canada.