Angela Nguku

Angela Nguku, BScN, MA, MSN, is a passionate maternal, newborn and adolescent health champion whose career spans over 15 years of dedicated work towards ending preventable maternal and newborn deaths globally. Angela is an experienced leader and programme management specialist in the Reproductive Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCAH) sector in Kenya, the African region and globally. She is an accomplished influencer and advocate and a passionate midwife who combines her proven influencing and negotiation skills in her advocacy for accountability work and has strategically campaigned for the health of mothers and newborns and the voice of midwives at different platforms nationally, regionally and globally.


Angela has worked as the Global Program Director, Action 2020 Family planning Accountability program where she led a ten country program aimed at ensuring that country-level commitments made at the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning (FP) were met through supporting strategic national and local accountability mechanisms that built the capacity of civil society to advocate for, and, where appropriate, the state and service providers to respond to civil society actions to ensure and accelerate the delivery of these FP commitments and the broader sexual reproductive health needs of the communities. Angela previously worked as the regional RMNCAH programs manager at Amref Health Africa where she led the multi country, multi donor RMNCAH programs; leading the teams and ensuring the overall results delivery and offering programmatic, technical and financial oversight of these programs in Eastern Africa. Angela pioneered the eLearning Nurse Midwife training programme at Amref Health Africa where she published the policy voice series ‘Nursing the future, eLearning and Clinical care in Kenya’’.


The Policy Voices Series examines the policy implications arising from the experience of innovators in Africa. This paper considers the work of an organization, chronicling what must be the ultimate test of any distance-learning programme: to achieve new standards of clinical care from hard-pressed nurses and midwives on the front line in Kenya’s busy hospitals and clinics Angela’s proven track record of high level accountability work has seen her engage with politicians at local, national and international levels; holding government duty bearers to account for commitments made to mothers, newborns, children and adolescents in Kenya, Africa and globally. Angela’s career as a leader started back in 2005 in South Sudan while working where she was met with the sad reality of mothers dying daily because of a dysfunctional health system as a result of decades of civil war. She has since worked in different capacities within the RMNCAH sector and within different organizations across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Moved by the high maternal and newborn mortality in Kenya, the South Sudan and many parts of the developing world, Angela mobilized other like minded players and founded the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood (WRA) Kenya

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