Cynthia Wandia

Cynthia is the Co-founder and CEO of Kwara, based in Nairobi, Kenya and Berlin, Germany.

Kwara was founded in 2018 to catapult savings and credit cooperatives into the 21st century and unlock their full digital potential by providing a shared banking platform, shared digital channels and credit scoring all as a service. Kwara has been selected to join Google’s Launchpad Accelerator Africa, Google’s London Immersion, and has won the Africa leg of the Global Fintech Festival, receiving a fast-track invitation to the Singapore Fintech Festival, has won the MIT round of the MIINT MBA Impact Competition and has been invited to speak at the UN Taskforce for the Digital Financing of the SDGs in New York.

Cynthia studied Electrical Engineering at Yale University, and has had her professional experience at IKEA (Greece), Lehman Brothers (New York) and Johnson & Johnson (Singapore) with further social work in Mexico, China, Cambodia, Venezuela and Kenya. She joined the German energy giant E.ON in 2010 holding various positions in energy trading and engineering prior to co-founding her first start-up, ASTRA innovations, to increase the accessibility of generation assets in 2014.

Cynthia is a Kenyan national, fluent in English, Spanish, French, German, and Swahili with additional proficiency in Mandarin and Portuguese.