Sheillah uses conservation leadership and education to encourage more involvement of young African women in the conservation sector through her initiative, “She4Nature” which was developed in 2020.
About Sheillah Munsabe
Sheillah Munsabe is an environmental enthusiast, in the areas of women empowerment in conservation and sustainability application in businesses and organisations. She has extensive proven expertise in creating and implementing community conservation projects, sustainable practices in waste management, and research in sustainability transition and approaches for SMEs. Sheillah thrives on seeing a world where human society prioritises nature protection and preservation for future generations. Sheillah is a first class honours graduate in International Business and Trade from the African Leadership University (ALU), and a graduate Conservation Scholar with African Leadership University School of Wildlife Conservation.
Furthermore, Sheillah is a business and environmental sustainability consultant. She is currently a consultant for the Gorilla Friendly™ park edge project at the International Gorilla Conservation Program, a project initiated by the Wildlife Friendly Enterprise Network. This project aims to build resiliency among local community park edge enterprises and is a certification program that encourages the development of gorilla friendly or environmentally friendly products and services.
She4Nature Work
She4Nature is an initiative that provides online conservation education and leadership programs to young African women and girls who are passionate about creating solutions towards the current environmental challenges faced by the continent and the entire world. She4Nature focuses on empowering young African women and girls to be change agents in creating sustainable, equitable, environmentally friendly business solutions to the environmental problems in their local communities in Africa. It is a platform that brings young African women together to be voices for wildlife conservation; to learn, share knowledge, and create impact in their communities.
She4Nature was established after a successful community conservation engagement of the Sustainable handicraft project with the rural women within the Northern province of Rwanda. Sheillah worked with five local women in Musanze to make handcrafted products like jewellery and interior decorations from fabric and metallic bottle top waste. During this time, she engaged with them in understanding the impact waste has on the environment and the reasons why innovative solutions towards waste management are required. She also worked with them on the product design and ensuring quality of these products. After this period, this group of women were able to find markets for their products, becoming suppliers to a number of handicraft shops in Musanze. Therefore, in order to reach a large number of young women passionate about different fields in the conservation sector, the Sustainable handicraft project was developed into She4Nature and is currently still in the first two years of piloting.
The importance of leadership and values
Sheillah believes our values determine how we execute leadership in a particular aspect. However, for the development of our continent, empowerment of the local citizens and communities should be a first priority in order to enable transformational leadership and sustainable development.
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