Claire Kanja: I have made great progress of growth over the few months of the fellowship program.

“…the fun learning sessions have been quite engaging and interactive. They have simply been practical as opposed to the monotonous theory day to day campus lectures.”

Claire Kanja

Problem Based Learning (PBL) program run by the C4DLab has been an absolutely amazing opportunity to get to learn so many exiting things all at one.

The experience so far has been mind blowing, getting to learn so many insightful things about myself, especially my personality, becoming more aware of the person I am, while learning to express myself more boldly and freely, completely without any fear. It’s a platform that has come in handy at a time when I needed to build my soft skills more so on the 4Cs: Communication, Creativity, Critical thinking and Collaboration.

My experience as an innovation fellow within the 2019/2020 cohort has been better than I expected. To begin with, the fun learning sessions have been quite engaging and interactive. They have simply been practical as opposed to the monotonous theory day to day campus lectures. In addition, getting to talk to the mentors and curators one on one was quite exciting.

From Left: Sonia Barasa, John Gitau and Claire Kanja during their Preliminary findings presentation at C4DLab, University of Nairobi.

The best part of the fellowship program was the workshop we had with the Finish students from Aalto University. The learning sessions on cultural differences facilitated by Dr. Steve Litchy were interesting and so was the Interaction amongst us and the Finish students.

At the same time, being a final year undergraduate student, I have been challenged to value time over the past few months. This is as a result of working on my final year project and the PBL, UNICEF and Botnar project. The interaction with my teammates and the rest of the fellows has been exciting and quite interesting especially the fact that we are all differently skilled and trained in a great diversity of career paths.

I can confidently assert that I have made great progress of growth over the few months of the fellowship program. Learning how to incorporate the Design thinking process in giving solutions to real life challenges and team work skills has been mind blowing.

(Claire Kanja is currently a fellow in the 2019/2020 University of Nairobi Innovation Fellowship. Email:clairekanja98@gmail.com)

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