Katalina Sheelongo is a community builder and a community leader. She runs a community group that creates products and crafts from raw materials from her village.
The group gathers under a tree with some of the unemployed village youth and share skills and knowledge to create crafts that can be sold to generate an income to sustain the livelihoods of the young people involved and their families and the community at large.
Her work started in high school when she was head girl in her school. She realised that not all students were academically talented, thus she introduced an event called My Talent at school as a way of catering for those students.
This platform gave them an opportunity to showcase their other aptitudes, thereby, making them feel that they too, had capabilities they could use to change their circumstances.
The project grew beyond high school and has become the engine of change in her community. Her vision is to see more self-employed youths creating job opportunities for others and investing in businesses that will change the face of communities.
She says, young people must begin to unite, in order to have more power than politics, and get involved in politics in order to develop and implement new ideas that will enable them to enhance, develop and implement new ideas of thinking to change the status quo.
