Wanja Laiboni

A CEO/Founder, advisor, and designer trained in Milan, Italy, alongside leading Italian designers, industrialists and iconic brands, Wanja grasps design’s power to solve problems, enhance our humanity and enrich our lives with beauty. Her Italian training has set an exceptional benchmark for design and production excellence, material innovation, value chains of heritage-based luxury brands, and design’s ability to shape identity and safeguard cultural heritage.

Purposefully merging her vision, training, experience of nearly a decade in a global career managing multi-million dollar grant portfolios and projects in International Development, and her commitment to contribute to Africa’s Creative and Cultural Industries, Wanja has founded two heritage-based enterprises. SIWWAA (www.siwwaa.com), a sustainable luxury accessories brand, merges one-of-a-kind, contemporary design inspired by Africa’s cultural and artistic capital with production excellence and sustainable raw materials supply chains. Crafting Kenya (www.craftingkenya.com) exists to unlock the potential of Africa’s craft and materials heritage for African and global design sectors.

A believer in innovation emerging at the intersection of different worldviews, Wanja brings the sum total of her global professional and educational experiences, an African viewpoint from her Kenyan upbringing, and a triple bottom line approach to business. Wanja is also a firm believer in heritage as an engine for innovation and an important civilizational legacy. As a CEO/ Founder, Wanja’s role is to deliver an innovative and coherent vision, and mobilize best-in-class collaborators to successfully execute our vision and give wings to the best ideas. As a designer, Wanja has charted an integrative design practice – “integrative” because it is end-to-end, multidisciplinary, and at the crossroads of research, identity, innovation and story-telling.

Wanja is also an alumna of the American University of Paris, where she graduated magna cum laude with two bachelor’s degrees in International Affairs and Comparative Literature, and a minor in International Communications. These degrees gave her a solid grasp of global economic, social and political systems, and a strong foundation in the humanities and critical thinking. In addition to English, Wanja is fluent in French and Kiswahili, and possesses intermediate level Spanish skills and professional proficiency of Italian.