Submit a nomination here.

Q: Is the New Voices Fellowship only open to people from African countries?

A: No! We welcome candidates from any developing country.

Q: Will I get paid as a New Voices Fellow?

A: No, but we pay all expenses for the fellowship, and often provide funds for Fellows to participate in media-related activities and conferences.

Q: How much time will I spend on the Fellowship?

A: We hold two major meetings during the fellowship year, where you'll be expected to travel and take part in intensive media training. These are usually each about 5 days long. In addition, most fellows estimate spending about 5 hours per week working on fellowship-related activities, including meeting with their mentors, taking part in interviews, and writing opinion pieces.

Q: Can I nominate myself for the Fellowship?

A: We ask that you find a mentor, supervisor or professor to nominate you, if possible.

Q: If I get many people to nominate me, am I more likely to be chosen as a New Voices Fellow

A: No. It's fine if more than one person nominates you, but this is not a popularity contest. You only need one good nomination.

Q: Can I miss one of your meetings if chosen as a fellow?

A: Unfortunately, these meetings are one of the core components of this Fellowship, and are mandatory.

Q: I'm a journalist/PR professional/communications expert. Can I participate in this Fellowship?

A: We love communications people, but this fellowship is really for development experts, not journalists/PR professionals/communications experts. There are many excellent fellowship programs for journalists, and we encourage you to apply for them!

Q: What do you look for in a New Voices Fellow?

A: For some examples of what we're looking for, check out the bios of our 2013 class of Fellows. We like people with big ideas, who have a proven track record of implementing them. We also like people with strong personal stories and the ability to think critically about development as it relates to their own experiences. Finally, we're looking for people who aren't shy about sharing their opinions, and have strong potential in writing and public speaking.

Q: Is there an age limit for this Fellowship?

A: No. In fact, we like people who have some experience, and recognize that often this comes with age.

New Voices Fellowship Alumni Council

In spring 2018, the New Voices Fellowship launched an Alumni Council. Members of the Council provide programmatic input and advice to the New Voices staff from their on-the-ground and Global South vantage point and serve as leaders for other alumni.

The initial Alumni Council is comprised of five alumni from across the initial five fellowship years (2013 to 2017). They are serving a two-year term.

Meet them!

Dr. GULREZ SHAH AZHAR

RAND Corporation
Assistant Policy Analyst

Gulrez is a researcher passionate about health, the environment and development. He along with other partners helped develop India’s first heat preparedness plan in Ahmedabad, India. He currently works as an Assistant Policy Analyst at the non-profit RAND Corporation and is also a Public Policy doctoral student at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, where his work focuses on heat waves. Previously he was an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Public Health, part of the Public Health Foundation of India, where he worked on issues of environmental health, climate change, and infectious diseases, focusing on surveillance and early-warning systems. He is a 2017 Aspen New Voices fellow.

ELSAMARIE D'SILVA

Red Dot Foundation
Founder & CEO

ElsaMarie is the Founder & CEO of Red Dot Foundation (Safecity) which is a platform that crowdsources personal experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public spaces. Since Safecity started in Dec 2012, it has become the largest crowd map on the issue in India, Kenya, Cameroon, and Nepal. ElsaMarie is an alumnus of the Stanford Draper Hills Summer School, the US Department of State’s Fortune Program and the Commonwealth Leadership Program. She is also a fellow with Rotary Peace, Vital Voices and a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader. She is listed as one of BBC Hindi’s 100 Women and has won Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award by Dusan Stojanovic (European Angel Investor of the Year 2013), Government of India Niti Aayog’s #WomenTransformingIndia award and The Digital Woman Award in Social Impact by SheThePeople. Recently she was awarded the Global Leadership Award by Vital Voices in the presence of Secretary Hillary Clinton. Prior to Safecity, she was in the aviation industry for 20 years where she worked with Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines. Her last portfolio was Vice President Network Planning & Charters where she oversaw the planning and implementation of 500 daily flights. She is a 2015 Aspen New Voices fellow.

JACQUELINE MUNA MUSIITWA, ESQ.

Financial Sector Deepening Uganda (FSDU)
Chief Executive

Jacqueline is currently the Chief Executive of Financial Sector Deepening Uganda, a company whose mission it is to support regulatory reform, conduct research that provides the basis for such reform and provides investment for innovation.  She is also the Founder and Managing Partner of Hoja Law Group, a boutique legal consultancy that represents clients in corporate governance, commercial and public law matters. Her focus is on the importance of good governance and rule of law, and on improving Africa’s standing in the world. She has served as an advisor to the director general of the World Trade Organization on trade policy as well as to the Rwandan Justice Ministry on investment, trade and infrastructure and private sector development. She is a 2011 Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellow, 2012 Mo Ibrahim Fellow and a 2011 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. She is a 2014 Aspen New Voices fellow.

DR. ESTHER NGUMBI

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Researcher, Entomology Department

Esther, a native of Kwale County, Kenya, is a distinguished researcher with the Entomology Department and African American Studies Department at The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She is an expert on issues of food security, education, agriculture, hunger, gender, youth activism, and sustainability and has authored more than 60 op-eds on these topics. She and her parents established the Dr. Ndumi Faulu Academy in Kenya to ensure that every child has a solid chance of getting a quality education. Esther serves on the Board of numerous organizations including The Virginia Gildersleeve International Fund, Development in Gardening, Soils4Climate, Angaza Kenya and Paths Education. She is a Commitment Mentor for Agriculture and an Alumni Ambassador with Clinton Global University Initiative. She was selected in 2018 as a senior fellow with The World Policy Institute. She was the recipient of 2018 Society of Experimental Biology Presidents Medal and the first to be awarded 2017 Emerging Sustainability Leader Award. She was a finalist for the President Clinton Global Hunger Leadership Award and was named by One World Action as one of the 100 powerful women who change the world. She is a 2015 Aspen New Voices Fellow.

SATHYA RAGHU

Cosmos Green & Kheyti
Co-Founder & President

Sathya is the co-founder & president of Cosmos Green & Kheyti, India-based social enterprises helping farmers grow better and sell better. CosmosGreen works on trading and supply chain management of fruits and vegetables on behalf of small farmers. Using unique “greenhouse in a box” technology, Kheyti, which won many global awards, is enabling farmers to produce seven times more yield and 12 times more income. Sathya believes that current annual incomes of farmers should become their monthly incomes with dependability. He strongly advocates that women-led, climate-smart farming with access to all necessary resources will be crucial for the global food security. He’s contributed to outlets like CNBC, Stanford Social Innovation Review, SciDevNet, Thomson Reuters, The Hindu Business Line and HuffPost. He given speeches at Aspen Ideas, Acumen Global Gathering, National Conference on Doubling Farmers Income in India, events of World Food Prize etc., He sat on the board of a state level farmer collective, which has access to a million farmers. Sathya is also a teacher who has trained over 20,000 students across India in finance and accounting and continues to do that on his weekends. He is a 2014 Acumen Fellow, 2018 Rainer Arnhold Fellow, and 2016 Aspen New Voices Fellow.

Andrew came to the Aspen Institute after spending more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent with Reuters, reporting on everything from post-Tiananmen China to the Baghdad trial of Saddam Hussein. Other assignments included a stint as Southern Africa bureau chief during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and more than three years traveling the world with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as Reuters' State Department correspondent. Andrew holds degrees from Columbia University and the University of California-Berkeley, and was a 2008 Nieman Global Health fellow at Harvard University. At Aspen, Andrew launched the New Voices Fellowship, which trains and supports trailblazing experts from Asia, Africa and Latin America to communicate effectively and play a larger role in championing solutions and advocating priorities for global development work.

Emily Kaiser is associate director of the Aspen Institute’s New Voices Fellowship. She is a former journalist who brings more than 20 years of experience covering stories from two dozen countries. After graduating from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, she joined Reuters in Chicago and then went on to postings in Washington, D.C., London and Singapore. She invests in media companies with a demonstrated commitment to building inclusive newsrooms that reflect the diversity of the communities they cover. Emily is a director of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which aims to break the cycle of poverty primarily through investments in early-childhood education, criminal justice reform, and access to healthcare. She is also a director of Global Press Institute, which trains and employs local journalists to report from some of the least-covered places on earth. Emily lives in Washington with her husband, two sons and a spoiled beagle.

Holly Kearl is the community manager for the Aspen Institute’s New Voices Fellowship and has worked with the alumni since Jan. 2015. Kearl is the founder of the nonprofit organization Stop Street Harassment and the author of three books and two national studies on street harassment as well as the author of more than 90 articles published by outlets like CNN, New York Times, TIME, Washington Post and the Guardian. She has given more than 330 media interviews and 165 talks since 2010 on sexual harassment and sexual assault. She also has served as an advisor or consultant on these topics to entities like UN Women, U.S. State Department, USAID, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, Google, Lyft and the city councils of New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Kearl received a master’s degree in Public Policy and Women’s Studies from George Washington University and bachelor’s degrees in history and women’s studies from Santa Clara University.

Caroline joined the New Voices team in November 2013 from ICF International where she worked for 6 years as a senior specialist providing project administration and coordination support to multiple international and Federal public health contracts. Prior to that, she worked as a staff and welfare officer at Liverpool VCT Care and Treatment (LVCT) in Nairobi, Kenya. LVCT is an indigenous Kenyan non-governmental and not-for-profit organization leading the push for universal HIV testing, counseling and treatment. A native of Kenya, Caroline graduated from the United States International University (USIU) Africa in Nairobi with a Bachelor of Science in International Business Administration.

Katy joined the Aspen New Voices team in August 2018 after five years at the American Society for Microbiology where she managed international global health portfolios in East Africa and the Middle East. While at ASM she was also the senior editor for Cultures, a small global health-focused magazine. Katy graduated from the George Washington University with degrees in Global Health and International Affairs. At Aspen, Katy serves as the New Voices Fellowship program manager, working closely with other staff members, mentors, and Fellows to design, support, and manage the growing Fellowship.