Colom Fellowship

The goal of the Colom Fellowship is to provide rising young African politicians exposure to law-making and legislative processes in the United States. The Fellows are then enabled to take their expertise back to their home countries as an aid in helping to strengthen and improve their own governments.

The 2006 recipient of the Colom Fellowship is Eric Mwenda of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Mwenda currently works in information technology in East Africa, with a focus on wireless and broadband internet technology.

Mwenda holds a Bachelor’s of Business Administration at the University of New Brunswick. The majority of his studies there focused on the area of finance, including finance derivatives, markets and institutions, investment management, financial management and corporate management.

After leaving college, Mwenda worked as an investment banking specialist for CIBCMellon in Toronto. While employed there, he had a number of prominent clients, including the American Growth Fund, Oppenheimer, Daimler-Chrysler, JP Morgan and AIG Insurance. His job duties included sensitivity analysis on variables influencing project cash flows, as well as tracking financial systems to identify key project risks.

Mwenda then returned to East Africa, where he became heavily involved in the Information Technologies market, an area that was critically lacking. He was instrumental in deploying the first WiFi networks in prominent public locations, including major East African airports. He is now involved in a project that seeks to create a completely new Wide Area Network and provide broadband wireless access to the entire community.