John was born in South Sudan at the height of the second civil war. His family fled the country when he was just a baby, and he grew up in the Kakuma refugee camp in the arid Turkana District of northwestern Kenya. Life there was hard, and he often went hungry, sometimes having to rely on short-term food aid from UNHCR. Seeing the suffering a refugee child goes through and also being directly affected gave him a purpose and a vision for finding a sustainable solution to problems of conflict and hunger. It also drove him to focus on education as the key to bringing this change to his community.
John completed elementary school in the camp and, with the support of the Sudan Scholar Federation, finished high school in the nearby community. Despite receiving good grades, he lacked the financial means to further his education. So, after high school, he returned to the camp and volunteered as a primary school teacher, a community mobilizer, and an interpreter for new refugees.
Today, he attends EARTH University in Costa Rica as a MasterCard Foundation Scholar. He studies agricultural science and plans to complete his Bachelor’s degree in 2019. He is already using what he is learning about sustainable agriculture to combat hunger and increase food security for the people of his adoptive community of Turkana and is being transformed into an agent of change with a mission of giving back to the community through agriculture.
Together with fellow MasterCard Scholar Lucia Lebasha, also from the Turkana region, John has developed the Save the Pastoralist initiative -- introducing dryland agriculture to nomadic pastoralist communities in Turkana and South Sudan, complementing livestock herding with crop production as a means of increasing both food security and income. Save the Pastoralist came in second in the Resolution Social Venture Challenge held during the 2016 Baobab Summit in Accra, Ghana, with a prize that included USD 4,000 in seed funding and mentoring support.
John believes transformative change is his passion and it is his will to make change, that counts. He believes that youth have the power to bring about this change and they just need the empowerment. To achieve this there is nothing for youth without the youth so they all need to be involved in the decision making when it comes to matters related to young people.
Meet John in the video below: