Wangui Karanja

(Sub-Saharan Africa Region)

Interests: Institutional capacity development, interface between leadership and social development, leadership development, organizational learning systems, grassroots initiatives.

Wangui Karanja is an organization development practitioner based in Kenya. For the past eleven years she has supported the institutional development of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. These comprise international and national Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), community based groups and faith-based organizations, which are the agencies through which most social development work takes place in Eastern Africa. Currently the hot issues in East Africa’s CSO sector include environmental degradation, water and food security and their relationship to exploding population patterns; a search for alternative funding sources in the wake of the global economic crisis and related, an intensified interest and exploration of South to South exchange of skills, financing, technology and trade. Wangui’s passion continues to rest on the centrality of the institutional development of social development actors and more recently, supporting South-South initiatives among East African NGOs.