A onetime Kenyan Somali refugee aims high

Fadumo Dayib: Graduate from the Harvard Kennedy School:   Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

“Of course, I think about the instability, I think about the insecurity, I think about the challenges that lie ahead, but I think these challenges face women wherever they are,” said future Somali presidential candidate Fadumo Dayib, who is graduating from the Harvard Kennedy School. “But the ultimate challenge really is: How far am I willing to go with my convictions?”

A onetime Kenyan Somali refugee aims high:When she graduates from the Kennedy School, Fadumo Dayib plans to run for president of Somalia

For Fadumo Dayib, the notion of home is a complicated one.

A Mason Fellow in the Mid-Career Master in Public Administration program at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), Dayib was born in Kenya, the daughter of uneducated Somali parents. Her father, a truck driver, and her mother, a “nomad,” had left Somalia to start their new life together in neighboring Kenya.

But the history of political and ethnic tensions between the two countries meant she and her family were never accepted by Kenyan society, said Dayib. In 1989, they were arrested and deported amid the spread of civil war in Somalia.READ MORE

SOURCE:http://news.harvard.edu/gazette