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 MaCie’ is a subject matter expert in sustainability, process improvement, and engagement of vulnerable communities. MaCie’ has a Master of Public Affairs from the number one MPA program in the country, with certifications in Lean and Green Belt Six Sigma. MaCie’ has worked for the City of Indianapolis’ Office of Sustainability, handling the city’s environmental, sustainability, and resilience work. She assisted with the public engagement, creation, and implementation of the City of Indianapolis’ first Sustainability and Resilience Action Plan and aided in the city being awarded a 2.5-million-dollar climate grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. In addition, MaCie’ has assisted with monumental change-making and engagement throughout the city of Indianapolis. She has assisted the Indianapolis Urban League and The African American Coalition in their African American Quality of Life Initiative to disperse a $100,000,000 grant awarded by the Lilly Endowment to better the quality of life of the African American Community. She additionally served as project lead for the Your Voice 2022 engagement campaign to garnish public input on the future City-County Council districts, the first engagement forum hosted on redistricting in the city’s history. Through all of this MaCie’ still finds time for her community as she is an active member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated and the Links, Incorporated, of which she serves as the International Trends and Services facet chair in this position MaCie’ created the program Black Women in Crisis focusing on Maternal Mortality of Black Women domestically and abroad. MaCie’ additionally serves on the board of her neighborhood association.

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Malaika Ogukwe, a Nigerian-American raised in the suburbs of Boston, MA, graduated from Pomona College, earning her bachelor’s degree in economics. She spent a semester in Copenhagen, Denmark, studying Globalization and European Economies at DIS. Malaika has always been passionate about youth & community work, and while at Pomona, she led multiple high school mentorship programs and served as a Jumpstart Team Leader in local preschool classrooms. Malaika spent her early career at a management consulting firm, a VC-backed beauty startup, and in tech. Her dedication to youth capacity building was reignited when she returned to Jumpstart, where she served as Site Manager at the Claremont Colleges site and managed the operations and partner relationships of the program. Malaika is grateful for the opportunity to support Emerging Leaders Foundation’s goal to empower the next generation of young leaders. After the Princeton in Africa Fellowship, Malaika plans to pursue a Master’s of Education. Malaika leads mindfulness & wellness workshops and in her free time enjoys creative expression, using ceramics, dance, yoga and photography as her mediums.

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 Sei-kashe M’pfunya is currently a second-year MPP student at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs focused on international development in sub-Saharan Africa. At Jackson, she is particularly interested in learning how to refine current philanthropic strategies in the region to better equip non-profit organizations and foundations to fulfill their goals for social impact. She also looks forward to learning how to leverage the arts and cultural sector for public well-being. At Yale, she is a curatorial assistant at the University Art Gallery and volunteers as a remote consultant for the Urban Culture and Heritage Initiative of Mbare, Zimbabwe. She graduated cum laude from Pomona College in 2021 with a BA in International Relations and Fine Art. While at Pomona, Sei-kashe was a resident assistant, creative director of the African Students Association, and founder of the annual Sanbonani! African Film Festival. Sei-kashe brings experience from non-profit and philanthropic sectors in spheres that include philanthropy (Schmidt Futures), art and culture (New York African Film Festival), STEM education (Ingressive for Good), and women (Global Fund for Women). Sei-kashe’s commitment to bringing about public good within sub-Saharan Africa stems from the promise and vitality she sees in her home country Zimbabwe. Sei-kashe plans to work for development organizations that center on sub-Saharan Africa and is excited to start that journey in Kenya

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Lauren’s upbringing in the diverse public school system of Albuquerque, New Mexico sparked her interest in community driven advocacy with a focus on migrant rights and women’s empowerment. From the age of 16, Lauren has engaged these passions internationally as a CBYX student in Berlin and as a Davis scholar at the United World College of Hong Kong. In Berlin, Lauren facilitated youth programming for Syrian refugees at the Malteser Refugee Center. In Hong Kong, she advocated for Indonesian and Filipino migrant workers. Lauren is a recent graduate of Tufts University, where she completed her B.A. in International Relations. During her undergraduate years, Lauren joined the staff at the Refugee and Immigrant Center where she supported fundraising and resettlement, and organized women’s programming for Afghan refugees. She was exposed to African and African American political thought while at Tufts, which has become the focus of her scholar activism. As a Laidlaw Scholar, Lauren conducted independent research on the erasure of African American women’s contributions to scholarship on Africa in the 1960s. She has also explored anticolonial approaches to citizenship in Uganda and Tanzania through her senior honors thesis. Bridging theory with practice, Lauren has interned with World Vision in Nkwanta, Ghana, where she collaborated with international development experts to broaden stakeholder engagement with water, sanitation and hygiene projects. In her free time, Lauren enjoys eating candy and writing poetry.

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 Kristen Tam graduated from UCLA with a degree in environmental science and a minor in food studies. At UCLA, she conducted research under Professor Jennifer Jay in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering analyzing the concentration of heavy metal levels in the soil in LA farms and promoting more sustainable food choices in the dining halls as the UCLA Sustainable Food Task Force’s Undergraduate Representative. Kristen culminated her studies at UCLA as the GIS lead and External Communications Officer in her environmental science senior practicum. Their team partnered with the Cameroon-based nonprofit, Agriculture for Africa, to implement soil testing, GIS mapping, and a solar irrigation system on the nonprofit’s farms in Nkongsamba, Cameroon. She also worked on an organic coffee farm on the Big Island of Hawaii during COVID to get hands-on farming experience. Following that, Kristen moved to North Platte, Nebraska and conducted research, discovering the positive effects on beneficial insect populations from planting native grasslands adjacent to corn fields. From the fields to Capitol Hill, Kristen interned with the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee to engage in how policymaking can affect farmers and sustainable food systems. Following the Princeton in Africa fellowship, she plans to pursue a joint graduate degree in environmental science and law school and pursue a career in sustainable agriculture law. Originally from San Francisco, Kristen enjoys running, road cycling, hiking and baking. Kristen was also President of the UCLA Triathlon Team and organized two Crowdfunding campaigns to send the team to Nationals.

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 Max Kaye recently graduated from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he majored in Culture and Politics (CULP) and obtained an African Studies certificate. Max designed his CULP major to look at strengthening state capacity on the African continent. He also closely follows developments in South and Central America and studied during his junior year in Argentina in a program centered on transnationalism and comparative development in South America. Max has a strong interest in philanthropy and has worked in business development at several nonprofits. As the Peace Programs Development intern at The Carter Center in Fall 2022, Max helped develop grant proposals and researched and created presentations related to European and Asian donors. Prior to that, Max was the Development Intern in the Global Economy and Development Program at Brookings Institution, where he supported the grants management and reporting process. Additionally, Max interned at PeaceTech Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to using tech and media to promote peace, and at the Culmore Clinic, a health care clinic for low-income, predominantly Spanish speaking clients. Max was raised in the Washington, D.C. area. During his free time, he loves to connect with friends and family, work out, watch a variety of sports, and read about new international developments.

Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Madeline Wong graduated from Tufts University with majors in biology and archaeology. Her college research with The Kibale Chimpanzee Project and The Kasiisi Project spanned biology, anthropology, conservation, and education in rural Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Madeline was the undergraduate One Health student contact in collaboration with Tufts Dental, Medical, and Veterinary schools and taught the importance of ancient cultures at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Uplifting her communities, Madeline supported microfinancing for immigrant small businesses in New York and Massachusetts. As a Princeton in Africa fellow with the communications and knowledge management team at the International Livestock Research Institute based in Nairobi, Kenya, Madeline has been reporting on sustainable livelihoods and gender projects that by design highlight South-South cooperation.

Kyilah Terry was born and raised in Chicago, IL and graduated with her Bachelor’s degree in International Studies and German from UCLA in 2019. In May 2021, she graduated from Georgetown University with her Master’s in International Relations with a concentration in migration diplomacy and refugee law. During her graduate studies, Kyilah worked as a research assistant at the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), the U.S. Institute of Peace (Africa Center), the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), and the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM), where she focused on forced displacement and migration management with a regional focus in Europe and Africa. These experiences culminated in her master’s capstone, which was later published in an academic journal, and focused on EU migration externalization policies in North Africa. As a result of her desire to gain more practical experience, she became a policy associate for an immigration consulting firm, where she authored legal and advocacy reports for non-profit immigration organizations in the D.C. area on climate-induced displacement in East Africa. Right before becoming a PiAf Fellow to IRC Kenya, she worked as a Congressional Fellow on Vice President Kamala Harris’s Domestic Policy team and handled VP Harris’s immigration portfolio.

Madison is from Frenchtown, NJ and graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Public and International Affairs with a minor in Global Health Policy. Growing up in a rural community, she has been interested in the field of development since a young age, specifically in health and agriculture. At Princeton, this interest was expanded to the international sphere when she interned at Mpala Research Centre in Kenya. Although she was working on an ecology project studying the local zebra population, this experience launched her interest in rural development. Following this experience, she worked with Community LIFT to research the impact of grassroots-based, community-member-led development in Memphis, Tennessee through qualitative survey collection. This project solidified her interest in leveraging investments to make positive social change. She also has strong competencies in grant writing, having worked in a government-capacity building with Emerging Public Leaders; research, having helped in drafting Rural Investments to Protect Our Environment’s white paper; and R, having assisted in the first analysis of International Care Ministries’ Uganda program. During her academic career, she mentored middle and high school students through a digital exchange program, worked to promote reproductive health on campus, and was a teaching assistant to a junior seminar that examined democracy and development promotion through USAID. Madison is excited to work with ILRI and continue to deepen her knowledge of agriculture development.

Aishwarya graduated from Seton Hall University with a bachelor’s degree in Economics. In 2022, she graduated from Yale University with a master’s in International & Development Economics. She wrote her master’s capstone on the impact of economic sanctions on political rights and civil liberties of recipient countries. At Seton Hall University, she served as an Editor in Chief of the University’s business newspaper. At Yale University, Aishwarya worked at the Lowenstein Project, a human rights clinic in the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School. She served on a project regarding water access in Palestine. Most recently, Aishwarya interned at Education Cannot Wait (ECW), a fund hosted by UNICEF that seeks to provide education in emergency and protracted-conflict zones. At ECW, Aishwarya worked in the Risk and Child Safeguarding unit, analyzing ECW’s portfolio risk, and evaluating the risks surrounding the fund’s grants. Furthermore, she assisted with drafting the fund’s policies for child safeguarding and prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse. Aishwarya has worked at the United Nations Office of the High Representative for Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries, and Small Island Developing States, and helped co-author a paper on the impact of COVID-19 on landlocked developing countries. She has also worked at Ernst & Young, a public accounting firm, as a consultant in Transfer Pricing and International Strategy. She enjoys photography, dancing, playing the guitar, hiking, baking, writing prose, tango, and learning about people’s lives. She plans to dedicate her career to international development and humanitarian assistance.