Our Team

ATHENA operates with a virtual team so as to ensure our global reach and our ability to function as leanly as possible without the financial and administrative burden of office space and other costs associated with a physical organization. Moreover, it is a political choice for all of our team members to be deeply rooted in our local communities and for us to be able to function and deliver high impact and high caliber work in the context of our lives where we wear “many hats”.

Olaoluwa Abagun
Executive Director
Olaoluwa is a lawyer, an unapologetic feminist, and an ardent believer in youth-led change making. She has a Masters in Gender and Development from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. She has over 7 years of experience in grassroots and high-level gender equality advocacy, facilitating participatory processes with young people, and programme management on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) issues, girls' education, and gender-based violence. From 2019 - 2021, she served as the Coordinator of the Commonwealth Youth Gender Equality Network (CYGEN), supporting collaborative advocacy efforts among 200 youth advocates across all regions of the Commonwealth. She has also worked as a Consultant with several INGOs and multilateral organisations, including UNICEF, UNGEI, Plan International, and the International Youth Alliance for Family Planning (IYAFP) where she designed and co-implemented youth engagement processes, learning/capacity strengthening interventions for SRHR advocates, and qualitative programme evaluation. She is also the Founder of Girl Pride Circle Initiative, a girls' rights advocacy NGO based in Nigeria.
Teresia Nyambura
Partnership and Capacity Strengthening Advisor
Teresia joined ATHENA in 2015 as Community Engagement lead. She is passionate about promoting HIV prevention strategies that work for women and girls in all our diversity. Teresia works across continents to mentor others and harnesses the mobilizing power of women. Teresia is from Kenya and has served in various Technical Working Groups including the elimination of mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Kenya, the National Steering Committee of the Beyond Zero Campaign led by the Kenyan First Lady Margaret Kenyatta. Teresia has documented experiences of women living with HIV who have endured coerced sterilization in Kenya and spearheaded a campaign to end the human rights violation. Teresia was a 2014 AVAC HIV Prevention Advocacy Fellow, advocating for PrEP roll out in Kenya and working with serodiscordant couples. Teresia is a founding member of the Personal Initiative for Positive Empowerment (PIPE Kenya), a non-profit organization based in Kenya. She was a member of the Global Community Advisory Group on the ECHO Trial and she is currently a member of the Global Community Advisory Group of the PURPOSE 1 Study. Teresia served as the chairperson of the International Community of Women Living with HIV and later as the Project Coordinator for ICW North America.
Catherine Nyambura
Director of Programs

Catherine Nyambura is an international development expert who self identifies as a Pan African feminist. Her academic background is in biomedical research and public policy. She has worked on sexual and reproductive health and rights, women’s rights, adolescent health, HIV/AIDS prevention, care, treatment, and research for over a decade. Her work, borne out of student activism transitioned into community organizing and currently involves working across the intricate linkages between grassroots organizing, national, regional, and global advocacy, programming, and research.

Catherine is the Director of Programs at ATHENA and enjoys her role working with feminist networks, adolescent girls and young women and grassroots movements on global health, advocacy and feminist movement building across Africa and globally to advance gender equity and human rights within the HIV response.

Catherine has worked as a consultant for various entities at the national, regional and global level, she is also a program advisor for the Strategic Initiative for the Horn of Africa, one of the largest feminist networks in East and Horn of Africa, is a member of the board of directors for Ipas Africa Alliance and serves as the chair for the regional activities working group for COFEM.

Catherine is also a Mandela Fellow 2016, Royal Commonwealth associate fellow, and 120 under 40 winner and was named one of the five young African women changemakers to know in 2015 by This is Africa. She has been published in the Agenda Feminist Journal (2018 Edition), the Gender and Development Journal (2018 edition), and featured on the centre for feminist foreign policy, among others.

Irene Ogeta
Program Officer for Young Women’s Advocacy

Irene Ogeta is a powerful, intelligent, and articulate Young Women Rights Activist and leader on HIV, sexual reproductive health and rights, and gender equality. She has been working on issues of menstrual health, pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, cervical cancer awareness, women’s rights, child protection, and advocacy for girl child education in Kenya, and many other issues key to the health, rights, and agency of adolescent girls and young women since 2010.  

Her passion for young women’s leadership, mentorship, and amplifying the voices of adolescent girls and young women occasioned her engagement in various advisory boards. These include The Positive action for girls and women board at ViiV since 2018; the ViiV Technical review committee since 2020; the Youth Reference Group for the International HIV & Adolescence workshop and the Tackle Africa advisory panel. Irene had the honor of actively participating in the 2021 United Nations General Assembly High-Level Meeting on AIDS in the thematic panel on "Advancing Gender Equality and Empowering Women and Girls in the AIDS Response", held on 10 June and she widely addressed the Priorities to address gender discrimination and intersecting inequalities and marginalization of AGYW in all their diversity across the globe. She is serving as the Associate Program Officer for young women’s advocacy at ATHENA Network 

Mamello Sejake
Advocacy and Communications Lead

Mamello started their career in advertising and as a content writer. They enjoy using the lessons they learnt in advertising with creative activism to contribute towards sustainable change and a better world. Their politics are guided by queer intersectional feminist principles, ethics of care and advocating for pleasure as a form of freedom and a human right. They believe that offering inclusive, affirming, and accessible sexual education, advocating for gender equity, human rights, sexual reproductive health and rights should be global priorities. They are currently working towards a master’s degree in women and gender studies and have an interest in identity politics, the complexities of kink, queer of colour critiques and politicising pleasure. Mamello is also a sex education workshop facilitator.