Glo-sponsored CNN African Voices profiles change agents

African Voices sponsored by Globacom on the Cable News Network(CNN) is profiling the impactful contributions of three  change agents  to their communities through education and innovation in its latest edition.

The trio who are guests in this week’s edition of the magazine programme include Tanzania’s girls’ advocate, Rebecca Gyumi; Solomon King Benge, the founder of Fundi bots from Kampala  and a social entrepreneur, Misan Rewane, who hails from Nigeria.

Gyumi, a lawyer, is the Founder & Executive Director at Msichana Initiative, a Tanzanian NGO which empowers the  girl-child through education, while addressing key challenges which limit girls’ rights to education.  has equally worked for over eight years with Femina, a youth focused organisation, as a TV personality.

Gyumi is respected for a  landmark case on child marriages which she won consequent upon  a petition she filed at the High Court of Tanzania. She had challenged the Tanzania Marriage Act, 1971 which legalises marriage by  adolescent girls from the age of 14.

Her victory on the case led to the decision to raise the minimum age of marriage to 18 for both Tanzanian  boys and girls. This, among other achievements culminated in the award of the  UN Human Rights Prize to her.

The second guest on the programme, Uganda’s Solomon King Bende founded Fundi Bots which  “employs robotics training within and outside  African schools to create and inspire a new generation of students and innovators who are better prepared for careers in the technology sector and who can become change-makers in their communities.”

An  engineer by training, Benge deploys science through robots to drive home the possibility of new innovations in Uganda.

The third guest, Nigeria’s Misan  Rewane, is equipping young adults with the skills to build careers of their choices.

Harvard-trained Rewane is the Chief Executive  Officer of WAVE (West Africa Vocational Education). He has a  resolve to ameliorate the incidence of youth unemployment in Nigeria, by teaching young people the skills needed to maintain successful careers in their chosen fields of human endeavour.