Dr Kakenya Ntaiya
A Kenyan is one of the ten shortlisted candidates for this years CNN Hero of the Year Award. Dr Kakenya Ntaiya from Enoosaen in Transmara, Narok County has been shortlisted because of what has been described as âinspiring change in her native Kenyan village.
After becoming the first woman in the village to attend college in the US, she returned to open the villages first primary school for girls. Today, Ms Ntaiya helps provide an education – and much more – to 155 girls.
Ntaiya and Mr George Bwelle from Cameroon are the only contestants from Africa. Bwelle, for decades, watched his father suffer, unable to get the medical attention he needed. Now a doctor himself, Bwelle travels into the jungles of his native Cameroon nearly every weekend, providing free surgery for those who donât have access to health care.
Others include Dale Beatty, Robin Emmons, Danielle Gletow, Tawanda Jones, Richard Nares, Chad Pregracke, Laura Stachel and Estella Pyfrom all from the US.
CNN Top 10 Heroes of 2013 recognises everyday people who are changing the world. Online voting for the âCNN Hero of the Yearâ opened Thursday, October 10 at 8am and will run through Sunday, November 17 at 11:59pm.
At the same time, the global chemical weapons watchdog working to eliminate chemical arms stockpiles around the battlefields of Syriaâs civil war won the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons ( OPCW), a relatively small organisation with a modest budget, dispatched experts to Syria after a sarin gas attack killed more than 1,400 people near Damascus in August.
“We were aware that our work silently but surely was contributing to peace in the world,” OPCW head Ahmet Uzumcu said. “The last few weeks have brought this to the fore. The entire international community has been made aware of our work.”
Changing the world
Nobel Peace Prize committee head Thorbjoern Jagland said the award was a reminder to nations such as the US and Russia to eliminate their own large stockpiles, especially because they are demanding that others do the same, like Syria.
“We now have the opportunity to get rid of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction… That would be a great event in history if we could achieve that,” he said.
Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, shot in the head a year ago by the Taliban, had been the bookmakers favourite to win the prize for her campaign for girls right to education.
The OPCW Syria mission was unprecedented in taking place in the heat of a civil war that has riven the country and killed more than 100,000 people. Members of the Hague-based OPCW team themselves came under sniper fire on August 26.
On Friday, government forces were trying to regain control of an area around Safira, about 20km southeast of Aleppo. The town, controlled by rebels including the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, is close to a major suspected chemical site.
Fridays award marks a return to the disarmament roots of the prize after some recent awards including the European Union last year and US President Barack Obama in 2009.
Those awards led to criticism that the committee was out of line with the spirit of the prize, founded by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.
His 1895 will says the prize should go to one of three causes – âfraternity between nationsâ, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.
The Hague-based OPCW was set up in 1997 to implement a 1992 global Chemical Weapons Convention to banish chemical arms and most recently helped destroy stockpiles in Iraq and Libya. It has about 500 staff and an annual budget under $100 million.
OPCW head Uzumcu told Norways NRK television: âI am sure…(the prize) will give encouragement to our staff to demonstrate more what they could do in terms of contributions to global peace and security. The $1.25 million prize will be presented in Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of Nobels death.
By CHARLES NG’ENO and REUTERS
