How We Started

I established Sawa Global based on a lifelong passion to see a better world.

Although I was born in the Netherlands, I grew up in Tanzania, East Africa where I had the unique opportunity to visit communities in the most poverty stricken areas of the world. While I was deeply touched by the problems in these areas, I was mesmerized by the local people’s strength and ability to find solutions to their challenges. I felt a strong sense of responsibility to help these communities. I wanted to give a voice to their inspiring, unknown leaders and bring their valuable lessons to the world. At the age of 7, I made a conscious decision to make this my life’s mission.

Since then, I have received 3 academic degrees, worked as an environmental advisor for over 15 years, become a part-time professor at the University of British Columbia, and traveled to over 40 countries. I have been to remote villages in India to film community projects; worked with nomadic tribes in Kenya to study the impacts of foreign aid projects; developed innovative tools to identify a sustainable water supply for urban slums in Tanzania and South Africa; collaborated with international organizations such as the World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO); worked with abused and neglected orphans in Colombia; and conducted media workshops in the remote islands of the South Pacific.

During the last 25 years, I have met hundreds of extraordinary grassroots leaders from some of the most impoverished nations. These leaders have offered powerful solutions to the global problems of extreme poverty, abandoned children, major diseases, and environment degradation. I felt that the global media needed to play a stronger role in telling these “stories of change” and that a new media could empower unknown heroes in the world’s poorest nations and inspire all citizens to instantaneous action to assist these local heroes’ leading initiatives. I wanted to see a world where millions of these heroes from the toughest places on earth could connect to millions of people worldwide. I hoped that in this way they would increase their impact to a larger scale and empower their own communities out of poverty. From this passion, Sawa Global was born.