Women's Health World Conference 2026

Biography

Ashoka Fellow Megan Mukuria is an award-winning leader in the field of gender equity and women’s health, with 24 years of experience in non-profit and for-profit leadership in Kenya and systems change on community and national policy levels in menstrual health, health systems strengthening, and education.

She built ZanaAfrica as a hybrid social enterprise from ideation into scaling impact, creating groundbreaking RCT-strength outcomes in menstrual management and related health and rights knowledge, social and gender norms, and agency and self-determination for school-going girls. Their non-profit arm now works to embed their proven curriculum into the Kenyan school curriculum for Classes 4-8, currently working with 250 teachers and 50,000 students.

Through the market, ZanaAfrica now sells sanitary pads to over 100,000 users per month, with a deep impact on girls’ outcomes and work-related outcomes for women. With their first equity investment, they are about to launch baby diapers – all products promote their Nia HealthLink, a toll-free hotline and chatbot that provides honest, rights-based answers to health and safety and directs people onward to local and digital points of care across the health, safety, and legal systems.

Megan is a dual citizen of Kenya and the US, past President of a Rotary Club in Kenya, where she launched the first-ever National Sanitary Towels Campaign in 2006, and is a Founder and past President of the Harvard Club of Kenya. When she is not working on ZanaAfrica she supports her husband’s start-up, Jasiri Mugumo School, where they are creating an Afrocentric, trauma-informed, learner-led curriculum to raise global leaders for the 21^st century.