Olela Tonny is a young active climate, youth policy and gender advocate. He is an optimistic, resilient, visionary, and entrepreneurial minded. He has 7 years of progressive experience in advocacy by supporting the implementation of programmes, administration, mentorship, and project coordination, monitoring and evaluation, and training.
His passions are in Gender advocacy (SDG 5), climate action, leadership, governance and democracy, innovation, problem solving and transformative development. He supports humanitarian activities and is a zealous volunteer.
He is a member of the United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA), Kenya Youth Advisory Panel (YAP). As a member of the panel, he advises the country office on ensuring that their programmes include and empower young people in Kenya. He is a co-founder and outreach coordinator at The polly Foundation, a community based organization in Siaya County. As an outreach coordinator, he has engaged in community outreaches, environmental cleaning, tree planting and training the communities on sustainable organic farming with an impact reach of 1200 small scale farmers in Siaya county and Kisumu.
At the peak of Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, there were increased cases of Climate crisis, SGBV and GBV and he successfully ran different online campaigns through his personal social media handles and the foundation, The Polly Foundation handles that reached over 2,500 youths across the world. He continues to play a great role in creating advocacy initiatives on the engagement of young people to champion for ecosystem restoration, and challenging them to be partners not recipients.
Close to hand, he has been affluent to share insights in panels both physical and virtual on youth policies, climate change, Road to COP 27, GBV, mental health, climate change and SRHR. Notably, in November 2021 during the rolling out of the Global cohort for Kectil Program Initiative of The Malmar Knowles Family Foundation, under the laws of Georgia, USA and Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, he was appointed the Regional Coordinator, Kenya chapter. In this role, he has identified and nurtured 150 highly talented young people in developing countries who have the potential to make a positive difference in their communities through knowledge management, leadership and design thinking training.
Further to the above, in November 2021, he was recognized by the Optiven Go Green Award as the best young Ecosystem Restoration champion. Tonny was recently elected as the Undersecretary head of administration for the Global Youth Consortium Agaisnt FGM, UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Program that unites 55 countries across the globe to rally young people to advocate against FGM.
Tonny holds a Degree in Education, Special Needs Education with IT (Sign Language) from Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology and a strong champion on youth policies, climate action, and gende. He can be reach through hie email tonnyolela@gmail.com and his twitter handle @OdhiamboOlela and Linkedin Tonny_Olela