I have held a torch in one hand and hope in the other.
Our story begins in delivery rooms where skill alone could not fix what was systemically broken - and where listening became the foundation of everything that followed.
Founder
Angela Nguku · Founder & Executive Director
A trained midwife whose leadership was shaped in real spaces of shortage - where a torch was sometimes the only light and a prayer the only backup. Those experiences taught her a hard truth: women and newborns do not experience health systems on paper. They experience them in minutes, in pain, in distance, in fees, in disrespect, in delays and in whether someone shows up.
From the delivery room to a national movement
Angela leads WRA Kenya through the Ask · Listen · Act Power Approach - grounded in listening to more than 3.5 million women and girls across Kenya. That listening has surfaced a difficult truth: pregnancy and childbirth in Kenya now sit inside a polycrisis of climate stress, hunger, poverty, displacement, insecurity and overstretched health systems.
Her work focuses on respectful maternity care and self-care, women's economic empowerment, transformative leadership, community organising and local action. She is building Action Villages - women-led spaces where mothers come to heal, learn and earn - and strengthening pathways for adolescent mothers to return to school and rebuild their futures with dignity.
“Women and newborns do not experience systems on paper. They experience them in minutes, in pain, in distance, in fees, in disrespect, in delays, and in whether someone shows up.”