Hilda Kegode, from Kenya, is currently pursuing her doctorate in Environmental/ Natural Resource Economics at the University of Pretoria.

Hilda’s parents, schoolteachers and subsistence farmers, instilled in her a lifelong appreciation for the value of education. She was successful academically and eager to pursue graduate studies. However, after completing her bachelor’s degree, she had to postpone those dreams to support her ailing mother and help educate younger siblings. Later, after working as a project administrator for CIRAD in Kenya, she obtained a master’s degree in environmental economics, then began working on impact assessment in East and West Africa with World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). During her seven years there, she became convinced that research must deliberately influence development interventions and that various socio-cultural factors including gender must be included in research design.

Her professional goal is to be an impact evaluation specialist in the areas of natural resource management and rural development, incorporating the views and needs of women. She is committed to using behavioral and experimental economics to better understand how to make interventions on natural resource use more effective, including to both target and empower rural communities in general and women in particular.

Milka Madahana, from Kenya, is pursuing her doctorate in Engineering, with Application of Engineering to Medicine, at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her PhD thesis focuses on medical technologies applied to lung function of infants and children. In future, she aims to simplify medical equipment in general and make it more widely available to women and children in rural and disadvantaged populations. She is also eyeing the potential for engineering technology to open new job opportunities for women, including via the use of artificial intelligence in the typically male-dominated field of mining.

Both in her personal and professional life, Milka has shown a commitment to women and children. She saw early on how women were often at a disadvantage, especially in receiving healthcare. Later, while studying engineering, she noticed enrolled women rarely finished the program. To counter that, she started a mentoring program for young females who were struggling academically, which helped increased retention of female engineers over the years. As a volunteer, she coordinated and fundraised for a care center and built a computer lab for women and children in Johannesburg.

Milka is one of only a few women in her field of study and specialization and has demonstrated exceptional research productivity: She has published in 13 peer-reviewed journals and alone is responsible for ten percent of the total research output of the University’s School of Electrical Engineering.