Team

Impart Liberia is one of the initiatives lead by One Young World Ambassador for Liberia,
Augustine K. Kou. With the help with fellow One Young World Ambassador for United Kingdom, Impart Liberia is fighting for global gender equality starting with our local communities.

Augustine Kou –

Augustine, 26, founded Impart Liberia, a local community group working against social injustices affecting youth. Through his I Learn to Earn initiative, Augustine addresses marginalization and unemployment facing his community by offering free tailoring training to 25 vulnerable girls. His iRespect project promotes mutual respect among people of different backgrounds: The project demonstrates the value of tolerance and helps settle disputes among students. Augustine also operates the Gems Kids Community Spelling Bee, Gems Kids One-Child-One-Bag project, and the Save My Job in the Rain initiative. Every year, over 17,000 people benefit, directly or indirectly, from Augustine’s social work.

Augustine K. Kou is the Founder & Executive Director of Impart Liberia.

Jia-Yan Gu –

Jia-Yan GU-International Development Volunteer-Impart Liberia 

Jia-Yan Gu is Executive Director at Goldman Sachs and leads a team of software engineers in the Technology division to build systems that optimise trading activities for best efficiency. Jia-Yan joined as a Technology Associate in 2013 after working at BT as a Senior Research Scientist where she used semantic web technology to develop business intelligence applications. Jia-Yan is a member of the WISE Young Women’s Board and actively promotes opportunities for women in Technology. Jia-Yan graduated from Cambridge University in 2008 with a master’s degree in Electrical

and Information Engineering. She was awarded a place on a prestigious international exchange programme at MIT where she joined CUER on the founding team that built UK’s first road-legal solar electric car and raced 3000km across Australia in the World Solar Challenge 2009. She became an ambassador for One Young World after representing UK on world development issues at its annual global Summit in 2011. Jia-Yan won a WISE Award and an AWA Award in 2012 for technology leadership and contributions to social causes.

I am a creative developer of technology. I feel very lucky to have chosen a career as an engineer because I’ve had some incredible experiences from building solar cars and racing across the Australian Outback to now be building exciting software platforms to optimise trading activities in the fastpaced industry of investment banking.

My favourite part of the day is when I meet with people on the trading floor to design ways of solving interesting challenges by working together with other technologists, operations experts and mathematicians to combine our different skills as a team. It’s very satisfying to be able to automate a process or to make a system faster because this helps to make business more efficient and creates lots of new opportunities.

At school, I studied Art (design), Geography (environment & society), Maths (logic & problemsolving), and Science (everything in the universe) and because engineering connects all these things together, I went on study a master’s degree in engineering at Cambridge University and MIT where I really started to get stuck into building robots, designing bridges and entrepreneurship. My first job was as a researcher in the latest web technologies at BT (British Telecom) and this where I discovered apprenticeships as another great way to start a career in technology.

To me, being an engineer means endless possibilities to change the world. The word “engineering” stems from the Latin word ingenerare, which means “to create”. Engineers are ingenious, inventive, enterprising, imaginative and inspired. All the girls I’ve met during my time as a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) ambassador are inquisitive and full of ideas. If any of this sounds like you, explore #PeopleLikeMe to learn about the huge range of roles in STEM that could be a perfect fit for you because there’s a rewarding career in STEM for everyone.

Jia is the International Development Volunteer of Impart Liberia.

Joyce Bernice Hart-National Development Volunteer-Impart Liberia

Joyce Bernice Hart is holder of Masters in International Relations from the University of Northampton in the UK.  She believes that once women are give the chance to acquire knowledge and skills, they can make the world a better place.

Joyce is the National Development Volunteer  of Impart Liberia.

 

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