Susan Mboya

Susan Mboya is a corporate executive and philanthropist who is the Principal and International Advisor for Navigators Global a Washington DC based consulting firm. Susan holds a number of board positions including the Chair of Liberty Group, a publicly traded company in the nairobi stock exchange. Susan is the immediate former President of the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation and the group director of the Eurasia Africa Group (EAG) for women’s economic empowerment at Coca-Cola. She is also the former First Lady of Nairobi County, Kenya's largest county and the capital city and economic centre of Kenya. She is married to the first Governor of Nairobi, Dr. Evans Kidero, and is the daughter of the late Tom Mboya, a Kenyan nationalist leader, and one of the founding fathers of the Republic of Kenya and the late Pamela Mboya, a renowned diplomat who was Kenya’s representative to UN Habitat. Tom Mboya was a well-known trade unionist, educationist, Pan Africanist, author, and a Cabinet Minister in Kenyas first post-independence Government. She is also the Founder of the Zawadi Africa Educational Fund, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that provides scholarships and leadership development training to academically gifted, marginalized African girls to enable them to attend top colleges and universities around the world with the objective of creating a pipeline of African female leaders. The Zawadi Africa program is based on the Africa Student Airlifts program launched by her father and President John F. Kennedy in 1959 that enabled luminaries including Barack Obama Sr, father of President Barack Obama, and Professor Wangari Mathaai to study in the U.S.

Susan Mboya obtained a B.Sc. in pharmacy from the University of Connecticutin 1988. She then went on to obtain a Master of Science (MSc,1991) and a doctorate (PhD, 1995) in industrial pharmacy, both at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.

Mboya is married to Governor Evans Kidero, the former governor of Nairobi County,Kenya.She is the third born child of Tom Mboya and Pamela Mboya.

Mboya has forged public private partnerships to help resource, fund and provide technical expertise for the initiatives, raising over $120 million in funding towards the 5by20 initiative to date and working with international partners including USAID, "GETF", DFID, TechnoServe, MercyCorpsand the International Finance Corporation. In EAG, 5by20 has empowered over 700,000 women as of end 2016.

Mboya is the founder and president of the Zawadi Africa Educational Fund, a non-profit organization modeled on her father’s famed student airlifts of the 1960s which took over 800 East African students to American universities and colleges.

In her role as First Lady of Nairobi County Dr Mboya has initiated and championed programs supporting children's education and welfare, women and girls empowerment, women's health and the environment.

In June 2009, Mboya was awarded an honorary doctorate in humanities by Lakeland University in recognition of her humanitarian activities with the Zawadi Africa Education Fund. In 2016 The University of Massachusetts (UMASS) in Boston awarded Mboya an honorary doctorate for her work with the Zawadi Africa Education Fund and with women’s economic empowerment and philanthropy in Africa