Carolyne has always known what she wants. However, there has been an inevitability about her career: an alchemy of village girl self-conscious grit and city bird confident elan, as evidenced by how she describes her life as a game of inches.
“We could get lost in the big moments, but if you break it down to the small wins, it compounds. Leadership is about being a better listener every day, your values, leading authentically and the relationships that you build— and this translates to grand things,” she says.
With her background in IT, she joined PATH, first overseeing its IT operations worldwide before taking the office where the buck stops.
"Leadership is about being a better listener every day, your values, leading authentically, and the relationships that you build—and this translates to grand things."
“I don’t have a background in public health, but people call me Dr Njuguna because I work with the MOH (Ministry of Health) frequently. PATH has taught me we limit ourselves and impose barriers, self-sabotaging, and are not willing to stretch ourselves. Especially as women,” she says of the lessons she has learned from leadership.
She is a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend, and a mentor to women. She is championing WIRED—Women Inspired Resilient Engaged and Disrupting—creating a network that sends the elevator down. Someone held the door for her, so she is breaking it down. Why hold the door when you can remove it?
This is important because there are certain bits of advice women should ignore, she counsels. For instance, she says, that for you to be considered successful, you have to be successful across all aspects of life: thriving career, personal relationships, et al. But life is about seasons and we should not limit success and look at it linearly.
“You could be in a thriving career and your personal life is struggling, does that mean you are unsuccessful? No. It is about redefining success and looking at it holistically. For women, one has to tick all the boxes—career, present for the family, thriving relationships—to be deemed successful,” she says.
Which is very unfair.
She says what success meant in her 20s is different now.
“Now I am looking for meaningful change. Is there an impact? What is the social good in it?” It is this same drive that steered her to be at the “vanguard of strategic engagement and relationships with the MOH”—her words. “To make the work we do sustainable, we want the government to take ownership. For instance, when we set up the first human milk bank in East and Central Africa at Pumwani Hospital, the project ended but till today it remains operational and led by the government.”
Can one have it all? “There are seasons when I have failed in being a present parent but I have learned boundaries, and accepted, help—we women leaders want to be the hero in everything. I am a more intentional parent now. Over the weekends, my children are my handbags,” she says.
Her life is that of a woman following her path, listening to the inner child within, who constantly whispers, “Master courage,” she says.
– By Eddy Ashioya
