Optimist I Entrepreneur I Visionary
Ogweno Stephen was featured on The Arrive Alive TV Show on Focus TV where he talked about road safety issues and the importance of hygiene and public health in the roads and with our public transit systems.
You can watch the full feature below
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The May Measurement Month is here with us once again and I am so excited. My organization Stowelink joins hand with the Kenya Cardiac Society and the International Society Of Hypertension and its partners to once again implement the May Measurement Month activities. In Kenya, Stowelink is coordinating the national campaigns with support from the Kenya Cardiac Society ensuring that all partners across the country have been trained and are conducting blood pressure screening activities. Locally, Stowelink is screening in the slum areas of Githurai 45 where we are offering blood pressure screenings, medical consultation and referral services every Sunday for the next 4 weeks. Our volunteers continue to be a crucial part of the screening process ensuring that they help in making these critical health services available to the members of the slum communities.
So why am I so excited about the activities of this project? One of the major reasons why I am so excited about this is the fact that every year cardiovascular diseases are still the leading killer diseases in the world yet a lot of the world population is not getting screened for high blood pressure early on. By actively screening thousands each year with the may measurement month I feel my contribution towards reducing this burden and that makes me proud. What makes me even prouder is that I’m doing this with a young team and we are proving services right inside the slum areas where people need them the most. This year we target at screening 2000 people within the month with our team and we are positive that we will hit the target.
May Measurement Month is a global blood pressure screening awareness campaign, launched in 2017 by our founding partner, the International Society of Hypertension. Our aim is to highlight the importance of measuring your blood pressure (BP) and to raise awareness of the dangers posed by elevated BP and hypertension. Our target is to increase the numbers of participants aged 18+ who are regularly getting their BP checked and to give people the tools to understand how this information can contribute to your knowledge about your individual health. MMM also provides diet and lifestyle advice to those with BP in the hypertensive range and to facilitate improved follow up for sufferers.
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Ogweno Stephen recently featured and contributed to a viral two-pager article on The Daily Nation Newspaper addressing the conversation on obesity in Kenya and the role that food applications and targeted advertising play. In the news article Ogweno addresses the critical question on the effect of these food apps but more than that he also offers practical suggestions and recommendations to solutions both at a policy level and implementation level to ensure better quality of food and a reduction in obesity attributed to food apps.
Here is a snippet of the article
WHO recommends that people take in unsaturated fats such as those in avocados, nuts of fish compared to saturated fats found in cheese, ghee and all kinds of trans-fat foods like French fries.
Stephen Ogweno, who works with WHO’s Global Coordinating Mechanism for Non-Communicable Diseases and an obesity awareness champion, points out that the proliferation of food apps in the country is worrying because of their ‘aggressive’ marketing, which targets young people.
“People think it is a cool thing to do so they tend to buy food online instead of cooking at home. The food may be cheap because it is being produced in bulk and that means that it has trans-fats, which are the most dangerous components in food,” he says.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://nation.africa/kenya/healthy-nation/the-impact-of-booming-online-food-delivery-industry-on-our-health-3847852
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Ogweno Stephen recently joined the Harambeans as one of the Harambean Lab ambassadors. The Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance is a US-based business network for African entrepreneurs that provides funding, university scholarships and a support ecosystem. The Alliance was founded by Okendo Lewis-Gayle and is supported by Cisco and the Oppenheimer Generations Foundation, amongst others. Harambeans are African innovators who have pledged “to work together as one” to unlock the potential of Africa.
The Harambean lab is an online repository of contextualized wealth of knowledge from the leading voices of African entrepreneurs that offer real insight into entrepreneurship in the continent. If you are a leading or an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to learn from the very best, then you can apply to access the Harambeans lab through the link below
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The month of May was a particularly important month for me, especially in my line of passion as a health professional. In this month, I got the opportunity to visit the global health capital, Geneva, got to make a stunning presentation at the World Heart Summit, got to visit the World Health Organization, and more than that got to do a feature for The Guardian on my work on obesity in Africa. May really confirmed to me that I was in the right space and it validated a lot of the work that we continue to do through my various health organizations including Stowelink, Lifesten Health, and NCD Champions.
Here is a copy of all the May features
Link to my session at the World Heart Sumit
https://cattendee.abstractsonline.com/meeting/9332/Session/68
Link to my article with The Guardian
Link to my article on obesity presented at the World Health Assembly
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Here is a visual diary of how my time in Geneva was. I must say, this was such a dream country to visit because, for one as a health professional, I got the opportunity to visit the World Health Organization’s office. I have to say this country really amazed me. There are very few people on the streets compared to my home country and everybody goes around their work. Well, enough of the reading, here are the photos:
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I am very privileged to announce that our first course in the practical skills for entrepreneurial success course series has been launched successfully on Udemy.
PRACTICAL SKILLS FOR ENTREPRENURAL SUCCESS: THE ENTREPRENUERS MINDSET is a short course aimed at beginner entrepreneurs that aims at teaching them practical skills to master the entrepreneurship mindset. This course focuses on the mindset component of entrepreneurship especially when an individual has an idea that they want to transform into a business or a venture.
In this course you will sharpen 1 key skill per lesson as shown below:
This course follows a very unique approach in that the author teaches from his own real life personal experiences in a witty , fun and exciting story telling format that ensures the learners have a clear background to the critical lessons and practical skills offered in this course. The course provides skills that are important in guiding you as an entrepreneur on building the right mindset anchored on fundamentals of entrepreneurship before you actually start your venture. Remember, the book is Think and Grow Rich not do and grow rich, emphasizing on the importance of mindset before skill set. Ultimately mindsets is the most important component of any business or venture as it will help you go through the various stages of business growth and development including challenges, failures and success.
This course has been primarily developed for first time entrepreneurs who want to go begin with the end in mind, who want to develop a strong mindset and develop critical entrepreneurial skills that will serve them over the long term. Ultimately, this course is for everyone who is interested in learning about the entrepreneur’s mindset and improve their outlooking business and entrepreneurship.
What you’ll learn
Are there any course requirements or prerequisites?
Who this course is for:
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Last week I went back home to a family that taught me how to be kind through actions and this is the Oyugi family. I remember in those early days of life when having two meals a day was a luxury and I was enrolled in one of the best free public schools in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the town that I grew up in.in the midst of finding it hard to make friends because of a clear socio-economic mismatch. A poor boy in a rich kid’s school and with me being the class errand boy going to buy French fries and pizzas for my classmates to have a share of the food for lunch. From all of that I found a best friend in what was truly a unique partnership, the poorest boy with probably the richest boy in school as best friends. More than that Brian who was my best friend and still is introduced me to the family and this was one very generous family. They took me in as one their own, allowed me to visit their home, and never treated me any differently.
One memory I can’t forget was on this one day when we had just come from school, and I remember brains mother pulling up in their vehicle as they usually did to pick Brian. On this day they were going for shopping, and they asked me to join them to the supermarket. When we got there, brains mom asked both of us to have our own trolleys and buy snacks and that she would pay for whatever we choose. On this day I did buy some new snacks and selected freely and true to her word she paid for the whole of it. And this got me thinking, could be also one day in a position where I make another person’s life better by being so generous as this family was to me?
Long story short, this family, taught me how to be generous, and last week, I went back to say thank you and to show my gratitude, and to tell them I dd not forget their kindness. I also shared with them signed copies of my books including practical skills. True to the word, a little generosity goes a long way, and I am a living example of that and a recipient of kindness which now I strive to share to one and all whom I cross paths with.
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As you know there has been a heated conversation on which poet produced the best poem under the theme Practical Skills For Entrepreneurial Success. Our poets have battled it online and they have shared widely with their networks.
Its time to move into the next phase of analysis of the voting process and eventually deciding on the winners wo will grace us on the launch of the book Practical Skills For Entrepreneurial Success.
Book launch updates.
Its now confirmed that the book launch will be happening in Nairobi CBD at the Clarion Hotel on the 24th of June from 7-10 pm. On this launch event we will be mostly having individuals attending by virtue of introduction and invitation as the event will be an invite only event that will be pre recorded and latter shared with the public.
If interested in supporting our course on training entrepreneurs with practical skills do reach out to legacyleadership@gmail.com
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COVID 19 saw the world experience for the first time a new type of pandemic, the infodemic. Health professionals and scientists became untrusted, theorists and celebrities suddenly became the trusted sources of information and social media became the number one source for information gathering and sharing. This also led to a lot of opportunists using the confusion to share wrong information, market brands and products that were not necessarily healthy and as a result many many people died, even more refused to adhere to the regulations seeing a rise in anti-vaxers and deniers of covid 19.
With these technical challenges, as a health professional and institution how do you communicate in a time of crisis, when new evidence is coming all the time and evidence is not enough or conclusive. How do you weave narrative that allows you move with your audiences to adjust with new evidence?
This is the topic that we discussed at the World heart summit and during the discussion, perhaps the one thing that came out best is trust. Without trust, there is no authenticity and with no authenticity people lose you. Which begs the question how health communicators build trust with their audiences and how can we work with health influences and communicators of the present to build trust and communicate effectively.
Some of the ways to do this include, working with influences to create and share content, simplifying health communication to local easy to understand language, government policies supporting health information and practices while discouraging the other negative information through taxations, bans and limitation, improving collaboration and creating communities of influence where information can be shared and trusted.
Overall, multi sectoral collaboration is the way to go!
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STEPHEN OGWENO