Yvonne Maingey: Young and ambitious

Welcome back to our screens, where did you disappear to?
School happened. After hosting Club Kiboko, I flew out to pursue my university education in London and New York but I am back and currently working on my PhD.

Impressive. When do we get to call you “Dr Yvonne Maingey”?
Hopefully next year. I am working on my thesis and I am in the data collection phase so if I can get some time off, I can be done with it and graduate. Thinking of taking February off if everything goes as planned but if that doesn’t work, I can always push it by a year.

How does it feel to be back on TV?
It feels good to be back though I never planned on coming back to be honest.

Why?
I don’t know, I never saw myself getting back in the media. It was such a random string of events that saw me come back.

Go on…
Mark Masai and I go to the same church and we have this fellowship called “Plug-in”, a 10-week discipleship programme. I was doing my presentation during graduation and Mark happened to be in church and he approached me and asked if I would like to do a screen test and I figured, ‘why not’ and gave it a chance. I came for the test and I passed. Here I am.

If you hadn’t met Mark Masai, you would never have come back to television?
Yes. I pretty much had my hands full. I am an advisor for UNEP and I also have school, so I was always busy and doing what I love but when the opportunity presented itself, I said yes to it not knowing what I was going to do.

How tight is your schedule now?
It is tight. I work seven days a week, between NTV, UNEP and school. But I love all three of them so, to me, it’s not work and I never feel the pressure since I enjoy everything I do.

You told me you are a nerd
Yes. I have been called that. (Laughs) I am an academic, super bookworm and I would rather be in the house reading something or working on something than be out clubbing.

When I go out, it is hiking, fishing, out in my parent’s farm, or just hanging out with my family and very small circle of friends.

I will once in a long while attend weddings and birthday parties. But you can never derail me. Yet I am social as compared to other nerds.

You don’t even have a Facebook account
Yes. I am on Twitter though but not as active as many would like.

What are some of your best reads?
Francine Rivers, Shakespeare, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Teju Cole, Binyavange Wainaina and Jane Austen are some of my all-time favourite authors but I can read anything as long as it is not science fiction. I don’t watch TV unless there is nothing else to do.

Explain why you’re called “UNEP Baby”.
That is what they call me at UNEP. I have been there since I was nine years old and I am still going strong.

I started an environmental project and programme as a child and I joined their Juniour board as one of their global members before moving to the Youth Advisory Council.

It is through UNEP that I got to meet icons like Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai and heads of state and very powerful and influential people in the world.

They must really value you
They do and I value them as well.

They are currently in the process of changing their strategy for engaging young people and I was given the opportunity to redo the strategy.

We are talking about the global strategy not just Kenya so I get to work on projects that have a global significance. It was a big honour.

Do you intend on being the director at UNEP?
Yes. That is a dream I hope will come to pass. My other grand dream is to be the UN Secretary General.

Have you always wanted to deal with the environment?
Yes. Mostly issues touching on governance and policy. I grew up in Athi River so I have always been connected to the environment.

I started seeing the importance of conserving the environment at a tender age.

When it didn’t rain, I felt the effect, when floods happened and the whole farm produce was swept, I saw the effect first hand. Things like human-wildlife conflict were real to me because we lived next to the Maasai.

That is why I probably started my environment projects early on.

How did you land on 'Club Kiboko'?
There were some environment project going on and Jimmy Gathu came to cover it and I was one of the people he interviewed and he said he loved my confidence and asked if I could do TV and my parents agreed and that was that.

The show made me more confident.

How long did you do the show?
For six years then it was time to go to college and I left the show and headed to the London School of Economics where I studied Law and later to New York University for my Masters.

But I always wanted to come back so I decided to come and pursue my PhD at the University of Nairobi with a Fellowship at Colombia University.

When it comes to environment, how bad is the situation?
It is dire. The only problem with the media is that we have to give climate change skeptics the same airtime as those who are fighting to save the environment.

Many don’t understand what climate change is all about or how serious the situation is.

For many in Kenya, it looks and feels foreign yet the effects are already here.

The skeptics may want to deny the effects of climate change but you cannot tell me that islands sinking like Tuvalu and Maldives is not caused by climate change.
Climate change is now a human rights issue. Many are food insecure, we even have climate change refugees now.

For a country like Kenya that is so dependent on rain for agriculture and even electricity, I would expect we take it more seriously.

Even our tourism will be affected heavily.

But is it all doom and gloom?
I am more confident of the future, the youth now understand climate change more than our parents ever did and that is a good thing.