Made in Africa: A Conversation with Elizabeth Wangeci Chege

My motto is: “What we build today will form the Africa of tomorrow.” I actually expanded that to say, “What we build today will form the Africa and the Africans of tomorrow.” And that’s looking at how we impact on our kids as well with the resources we have around them. And the built environment is one great place to start.

In episode three of Made in Africa, Driving Change’s conversation series with African visionaries whose work impacts the public good, Elizabeth Wangeci Chege speaks with Sarika Bansal about her life and career. Chege is the CEO and co-founder of WEB Limited, a sustainability design consultancy based in Nairobi, Kenya. Until recently, she was also the chairperson of the Kenya Green Building Society.

Chege wants to transform how we think about designing buildings, and cities more generally. She believes the built environment can be designed to accommodate the needs of human beings as well as the environment.

She got her start working on high-profile design projects around the world — from the UK to Australia to Dubai — and then decided to bring her expertise back to Kenya, where she helped form the Kenya Green Building Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advocacy, education and certification of green architecture in Kenya. She also frequently works with the Kenyan government, including helping them update their policy codes from the 1960s British ones that were passed on during independence.

Chege has big visions for Africa’s future, and we hope you enjoy hearing some of them in this conversation.

We hope you are as inspired by these podcasts as we are. If you are, please subscribe here, or wherever you get your podcasts (Amazon Music, Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher), and please rate us and write a review so others can find their inspiration.

Sarika Bansal

Sarika Bansal is an editor and storytelling consultant. She was the founder and editor-in-chief of BRIGHT Magazine, an award-winning digital magazine that told fresh, solutions-oriented stories about social change. Prior to that, she incubated two social impact publications at Medium, developed curriculum and tools for journalists at the Solutions Journalism Network, and served as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Her byline has appeared in the New York Times, Al Jazeera America, Guardian, VICE, Forbes, FastCompany, and other publications. She holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a Masters in Public Administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). She lives in a cottage in a forest in Nairobi, Kenya with her husband, daughter, and elderly German shepherd.

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