Crowned in Purpose, Rooted in Service _ A Conversation With Margaret Mliwa | Episode 2
The Source and The Oasis
Nairobi’s late-morning light spilled across the tiled hallway of the Ford Foundation offices as a familiar voice, warm and precise, began: “Good morning, good afternoon, good evening from wherever you’re listening to us.” The greeting belonged to Jacqueline Asiimwe, CEO within the CivSource Africa Galaxy, who was in the city to record a prelude to the Leaders’ Gala & Ball on 2 October. Her guest was Margaret Wawuda, Regional Director, Ford Foundation, East Africa, whose schedule would keep her from attending in person, but whose voice, she promised, would “be in the room.”
Before policy and programs, there was something more intimate. “Tell us something we wouldn’t know,” Asiimwe asked. The answer arrived with a smile. “I am Margaret Mliwa Wawuda, Wawuda means fighter. I fight my battles. People don’t expect it because I smile a lot,” she said. And then, with a laugh and a sudden shard of East African nostalgia: “I love cassava. Boiled, fried, roasted. When I come to Uganda, I buy the roast and carry it back for breakfast.” The room softened; leadership, like culture, begins close to the ground.
Asked when she first recognized her leadership, Margaret hesitated, not because the evidence was thin, but because she had long experienced leadership as something others saw in her before she embraced it herself. In primary school she became head girl. In secondary school (her first school offered no A-Levels), she was head girl again. When she moved for A-Levels, she was, again, head girl. The pattern continued at home too. She is the eighth of twelve, a large household in which two nephews were her age. “I always asked: what do people see in me that they keep choosing me?”
Her instinct, she insists, is to serve from the background. “My strength is in the kitchen,” she said, meaning the quiet places where the real work is organized and made possible. “I want to cook and allow others to serve.” Yet life kept escorting her out of the kitchen and into the front of the house. Over time she learned not simply to accept that movement, but to read it as a call: “People must be seeing something in me,” she said. “So I began to embrace it.”
If leadership kept finding her, what has she learned to hold onto? Margaret names three anchors:
Empathy. Leadership is service, and service is relational. “You’re not serving in isolation,” she said. “How do I get the best of everyone?” That requires meeting people where they are, recognizing difference, and then doing the hard work of alignment around a shared vision. As Regional Director, she asks simple, clarifying questions: Why are we here? What are we doing? What is our core mandate? Once those are surfaced, “the question is: what is our shared vision?”
Compassion. Teams contain go-getters and laid-back temperaments, strengths and shortcomings, “valleys and mountains.” She refuses the tidy fiction that we must edit out our humanness to be professional. “We have to think about our humanness with compassion,” she said, toward others and ourselves.
Generosity. She calls it the daily practice of grace. People arrive as weather systems, sunny one morning, closed and quiet the next. The work is to make room for that variance. “Extend grace when they’re in the valley, when they’re on the mountaintop, even when they’re irritated,” she said. “Allow everyone to be who they are.”
At Ford Foundation, the commitment to leadership is a throughline. “We fund in three ways,” Margaret explained. “Institutions, ideas, and individuals.” A strong institution requires a leader with a vision, and the discipline to build systems that endure “long after the leader has left.” On individuals, Ford looks for “pockets of change”, people who move the world in their own contexts, sometimes quietly, always persistently.
That investment is urgent because social justice work moves in uneven meters. “You take ten steps forward, then ten steps back,” Margaret said. The terrain is complex: closing civic space, gender justice, disability inclusion, climate justice, economic justice. In East Africa especially, the map keeps shifting. “You have to keep filling people, supporting people,” she said, connecting leaders to cohorts so they can compare notes, draw courage, and share the practical wisdom that only peers can offer.
When Asiimwe asked about her time at the Experience Retreat (hosted by CivSource Africa and CivLegacy), Margaret didn’t hesitate: “Life-changing.” She arrived at a low point. “I was questioning whether I was making any impact. I thought, maybe I should quit.” The space itself argued otherwise. Aromas, bean bags, intentional design, it was a masterclass in how physical environments shape spirit. “The space you’re in can either dump your spirit or lift it,” she said. This space lifted.
Facilitation that first leveled the room, worries, aspirations, fears,then invited vulnerability. “I hadn’t cried for quite some time,” she admitted. “That made me cry, and lift.” The retreat’s language of chakras helped her name what had dimmed; a fire ceremony helped her lay it down. “Whatever I burned in that fire, I burned,” she said. “I came back fresh to self. Confidence returned.”
But the most durable gift was cohort. “You realize you’re not the only one,” she said. “There is power in the collective, in offloading what you’re carrying and embracing new ways of dealing with issues.”
CivSource Africa will mark eight years on 1 October and, at the Gala the next day, launch its big dream, the Leaders’ Oasis, a purpose-built retreat space after years of bringing soul into other people’s venues. Asked for a wish, Margaret smiled at the language: “Words have power,” she said. Source conjures life; Oasis conjures life again. “You invoke existence, well-being.”
Her counsel for the next chapter is as philosophical as it is practical: embed indigenous leadership into contemporary practice. She invoked enterprise leadership, more horizontal than vertical, and the communal grammar of African life. “More of others and less of us,” she said of leaders. “Leadership is building, mentoring, coaching, holding hands, crying with people, laughing with your people. When you fail, we have failed. When you manage, we have won.”
She will miss being in the room, she said, but her voice will travel with the program. There were warm nods to ongoing friendships, “an accountability partner,” she mentioned with a grin, and a final invitation: if you haven’t attended the Experience Retreat, you are “missing the experience of a lifetime.”
The recorder clicked off. In a city that holds so many of the continent’s contradictions, urgency and poise, velocity and patience, the conversation returned to first things: grace, shared vision, collective strength, and the stubborn, quiet confidence of a leader who keeps getting pulled from the kitchen to the front of the house, not because she chases the spotlight, but because she knows how to feed a room.
Quotes
“Muliwawuda means fighter. I fight my battles. People don’t expect it because I smile a lot.” — Margaret Wawuda
“Leadership is service—and service is relational. How do I get the best of everyone?” — Margaret Wawuda
“We have valleys and mountains. Extend grace in both. Allow everyone to be who they are.” — Margaret Wawuda
“We fund institutions, ideas, and individuals—because pockets of change move the world.” — Margaret Wawuda
“The space you’re in can dump your spirit or lift it. The retreat lifted mine.” — Margaret Wawuda
“Whatever I burned in that fire, I burned. I came back fresh to self.” — Margaret Wawuda
“More of others and less of us: leadership is holding hands, crying, laughing—together.” — Margaret Wawuda
“When you fail, we have failed. When you manage, we have won.” — Margaret Wawuda
“‘Source’ and ‘Oasis’ invoke life. Words have power.” — Margaret Wawuda