Nerima Wako Ojiwa on technology, youth-led democracy, and organizing at the speed of crisis.
Peacebuilding does not always unfold slowly.
Sometimes, it happens in moments of crisis—when institutions fail, when violence is imminent, and when the only thing standing between disappearance and survival is collective action.
This is where Nerima Wako Ojiwa enters the story.
As the founder and executive director of Siasa Place, one of Kenya’s most influential youth-led political organizations, Nerima represents a proactive and vital expression of feminist peacebuilding: fast, adaptive, deeply networked, and rooted in solidarity, showing how democracy must often be defended in real time.
From Distance to Determination
Nerima’s political awakening began far from home. In 2012, while interning in Washington, D.C. with Search for Common Ground, she watched conflict escalate in East Africa and felt the weight of distance—geographic and political.
“I felt removed,” she says. “And that made me question not just what was happening there, but what was happening at home in Kenya.”
When she returned, she noticed a gap between activism and politics that led to systemic change. Youth organizations existed, but few were willing to engage in or with politics directly, whether governance, policy, or power. Online spaces for serious political debate were rare.
So, she decided to help create one.
Siasa Place—siasa meaning “politics” in Swahili—was designed as an explicitly political, youth-centered, digital-first space. Its purpose was simple and radical: to give young people room to deliberate about their future, to organize collectively, and to reclaim politics as somewhere they belong.
Feminist Leadership in a Hostile Arena
Leading this kind of space as a young woman in Kenya came with immediate costs. Nerima was in her early twenties at the time—petite, outspoken, and operating in a deeply male-dominated political environment. She encountered disbelief, harassment, and persistent assumptions that a man must be behind her work.
“There has to be a godfather,” people said. Or a rich uncle. Or a political patron.
But Nerima was doing everything herself.
For years, she ran Siasa Place without funding, navigating precarity while building credibility. She also learned—like many women before her—how to protect herself, adapting her behavior to avoid advances from men in ways that reshaped her leadership and hardened her resolve.
Perhaps the most telling moment, however, came later, when Nerima was debating running for office herself—and a male colleague told her she should not run for a women’s political seat because she’d transcended gender entirely. (Kenya has constitutional female quotas in parliament, mandating that no more than two-thirds of members in elective or appointive bodies can be of the same gender. However, the country has struggled to meet this quota, with women holding about 23% of parliamentary seats as of 2022.)
It was meant as praise. It revealed the cost of legitimacy.
Organizing as Peacebuilding
Unlike many leaders trained through formal mentorship, Nerima learned to organize through crisis.
The most recent example still reverberates. In May 2025, activists Boniface Mwangi of Kenya and Agather Atuhaire of Uganda were abducted in Tanzania after showing solidarity with an opposition leader. Nerima helped coordinate a rapid-response network across borders—using encrypted messaging, social media amplification, and collective pressure.
Four days later, both were released.
“They couldn’t kill us because people were making too much noise online,” Agather later told her.
This experience underscored Nerima’s belief that if you are not involved in politics, if there is no good governance, you’re not going to be able to have a good—or safe—life. “And that’s what we translate in all of our Siasa Place forums,” she says. “This is why you should be engaged, because everything is a political decision.”
Technology, Deliberation, and Power
At Siasa Place, technology is not treated as a single solution but as a menu of tools, deployed intentionally at different moments:
- TikTok to raise awareness and funds.
- Messaging platforms to coordinate action.
- Deliberative technologies like Polis and Remesh to shape policy outcomes.
What Nerima values most about these tools is their refusal of hierarchy. Influence cannot be bought or performed, and participants must think for themselves.
For a generation shaped by influencers and algorithmic culture, this kind of engagement carries real weight—and it works. One striking example: Youth participation through Siasa Place pressured the Kenyan government into withdrawing a proposal that would have cut funding for youth programming entirely. The outcome showed that when young people organize and speak collectively, they can shift policy directly.
Nerima sees her work as bridging the gap between mobilization and meaningful political participation. “We are channeling our people to understand how policy works,” she explains, “and why inclusive involvement matters for the betterment of the majority—rather than allowing purely selfish actors to dominate these spaces.” She also points to progress on more fundamental challenges, like making information accessible so that people can engage without feeling locked out of the process.
Mutual Aid as Feminist Democracy
Perhaps the most powerful shift Nerima describes is cultural. Kenyan youth—many disillusioned by the state—have begun to act as one another’s safety net. They have raised millions to bail out protesters, cover medical bills, and support families in crisis.
This is not issue-based activism. It is solidarity as infrastructure.
And it is being led, overwhelmingly, by young women.
Refusing Erasure
Before we end our conversation, Nerima raises a final concern—one that echoes across feminist history.
“These movements are being led by women,” she says. “And women get erased.”
Technology, she believes, gives us a chance to interrupt that pattern—to document leadership, to create an archive of memory as it happens, to leave digital footprints that future generations can trace. For Nerima, this preservation is through Siasa Place. But each of us is capable of participating in it—because the act of recording is itself a form of peacebuilding, as is the full spectrum of feminist democratic work today: patient and urgent, institutional and insurgent, grounded in care and driven by courage.
The first step is simply to choose to take part.
