“I was able to give the young girls hope,” says Dorothy Mwawasi, reflecting upon the impact of volunteering in her home country of Kenya.
Though Mwawasi is a now a United States citizen, she is originally from Mombasa. In 2014 she spent three months as a volunteer there working with a local nongovernmental organization, Sauti ya Wanawake Pwani. She is one of 40 U.S. volunteers who have traveled overseas through the Diasporas for Development initiative, a private-public alliance between Cuso International, Accenture and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In Mombasa, Mwawasi worked side by side with volunteers who did not have Kenyan roots, and while they all were able to provide professional expertise to the NGO to help build its service delivery capacity, Mwawasi said her impact was different because she had grown up in the region. She was able to talk to families, particularly fathers and young women, about the importance of education as an insider who understood the cultural and economic context of the region.