Ashoka
On 27 March 2026, we marked an important moment for our organisation. At our Nairobi office on Ngong Road, outgoing board members formally handed over to a new board of directors in a ceremony that honoured both the foundations we have built and the future we are determined to create.
The handover marks a pivotal moment not just for us, but for the broader social entrepreneurship ecosystem across East Africa. For more than two decades, Ashoka East Africa has worked to identify and support the most extraordinary changemakers in the region. Social entrepreneurs who enable systems change. These leaders do not simply respond to problems but fundamentally reimagine the systems that create them.
The new board brings together six exceptional individuals whose combined experience spans climate resilience, public health, youth development, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and global social innovation. Together, they represent a powerful convergence of local knowledge and global perspective. Precisely the kind of leadership that systems change demands.
Meet our new board.
Each member of this board arrives not as a passive steward, but as an active architect, someone whose life's work already embodies the change, we exist to amplify.
Dr Wamuyu Mahinda, Ashoka Fellow since 2010
Managing Partner, Collaborative Value Partners – Africa (CVP-Africa)
Dr Mahinda has spent her career dismantling one of the most persistent barriers to social impact: the tendency of organisations to compete where they should collaborate. As Managing Partner of CVP-Africa, she convenes multi-stakeholder alliances that drive population-level change, uniting NGOs, governments, and the private sector around shared goals. As Co-Chair of the Catalyst 2030 Africa Chapter, she is helping to redefine what African-led, African-owned solutions look like on the global stage. Her presence on this board signals a deep commitment to the kind of systemic, coalition-driven change our next chapter demands.
Haron Wachira, Ashoka Fellow since 2010
Founder, The Akili Group
Haron is proof that the most transformative solutions often begin with the simplest question: what does this land, and these people, actually need? Through The Akili Group, he has mobilised over 300,000 smallholder farmers across more than one million hectares in Kenya, combining agroforestry, biochar, grassland restoration, and holistic health education, all funded through carbon credits in a model that is as financially innovative as it is ecologically vital. A former ICT professional with global consulting experience, Haron brings to the board a rare combination of technical rigour, entrepreneurial courage, and a grounded understanding of rural African realities.
Sam Agutu, Ashoka Fellow since 2012
Founder & CEO, Chronic Drugs Medical Scheme; Co-Founder, Tendo Social Development Group
Sam understands that health and dignity are inseparable. As founder and CEO of the Chronic Drugs Medical Scheme, he has worked to close the gap in access to medicines for rural health facilities and urban clinics serving the most underserved populations. Through Tendo Social Development Group, he is building urban resilience in Nairobi's Mukuru settlement, creating livelihoods through certified hygiene product manufacturing and waste recycling. Sam's work sits at the intersection of public health, economic empowerment, and community dignity, a perspective that will be invaluable as we deepen our impact in urban and peri-urban contexts.
Alex Mitijans, Ashoka Global (Planet & Climate)
Head of Planet & Climate, Ashoka (Washington DC)
Alex brings to this board the weight of Ashoka's global environmental mission and a career that has traversed sectors with remarkable intentionality. Having led Ashoka Spain, co-launched The Wellbeing Project, and now headed Ashoka's Planet & Climate portfolio from Washington DC, she understands both the mechanics of institutional change and the personal sustainability required to drive it. Her international perspective and cross-sector networks will help us connect regional changemakers to global conversations on climate and systems change, ensuring East Africa's innovations are heard at the highest levels.
Ara Kusuma, Young Changemaker & Youth Years Leader
Youth Years Leader, Ashoka Indonesia
Ara started changing the world at ten years old and has never stopped. From integrating 150 farmers in Indonesia through her first venture, to reaching 4,500 children across 64 villages during the COVID-19 pandemic, to embedding changemaking principles into over 190 schools through partnerships with Indonesia's largest educational networks, Ara's work is a living demonstration of our core conviction: that young people are not future changemakers, they are changemakers now. Her voice on this board will ensure that our programmes remain genuinely, youth-centred. A National Geographic Young Explorer (2020), she represents a generation that will not wait.
President Emerita and Leadership & Impact Co-lead, Ashoka
Diana joined Ashoka after graduating from Brown University and played a key role in creating the Fellowship Support program, strengthening connections among social entrepreneurs. Holding a PhD in anthropology from New York University, her work has focused on understanding how social change emerges from local contexts. As President, she led Ashoka’s global expansion, significantly increasing the number of Fellows and pioneering tools to measure social impact. Diana is also an educator, advisor, and award-winning leader recognised for her contributions to social innovation and global change.
What this board means for our mission
Look across these six profiles, and a clear picture emerges, not of individuals who have found success within existing systems, but of people who have spent their careers questioning those systems, bending them, rebuilding them from the ground up.
Systems change is not a slogan. It is the painstaking, often invisible work of shifting the rules, norms, and power structures that determine who gets access, who gets heard, and who gets to thrive. It requires governance that is as courageous as it is strategic, leadership that can hold long-term vision without losing sight of the people those systems are meant to serve. Our new board has demonstrated exactly that capacity, in their own organisations and communities, over many years.
We also extend our deepest gratitude to the outgoing board members for their years of dedicated service. Their guidance shaped everything we have become, and it is on that foundation that this next chapter will be built.
As we continue to identify, support, and connect East Africa's most extraordinary social entrepreneurs, we do so now with a board that truly embodies the mission it exists to advance. Because the most powerful thing a board can do is not simply to govern an organisation, it is to model what that organisation believes.
And what we believe is this: that every person, in every community, carries the potential to be a changemaker.