Our Team
Meet our team
One of the cornerstones of our initiative is our team, a lean but strong dedicated group of individuals who are enthusiastic about creating locally-relevant solutions and achieving impact. The fact some of our team members are displaced people (refugees) gives us the leverage and advantage of seeing community problems in the lens of the refugees, together we count on our collective experience as a force of transformation.
Jaiksana Soro
Executive Director
Jaiksana Soro
Executive Director
Founder of the O-Space Innovation Hub in Yei, South Sudan, was forced to move to the Rhino Camp refugee settlement, Uganda due to armed conflicts in 2016. There he founded Platform Africa, a community-based organization engaged to reach young refugees through the power of media, education, and technology to foster equitable, informed, and resilient societies. As a lead #defyhatenow correspondent, Jaiksana has been running workshops on social media literacy, trauma, and hate speech mitigation. He’s also an open hardware skills trainer, having helped develop #ASKotec – a hands-on technical resource and repair kit for community trainers, created for mobile field-use where there is limited access to power and internet connectivity.
Sharlotte Ainebyoona
Mental Health programs coordinator
Sharlotte Ainebyoona
Mental Health programs coordinator
Ainebyoona Sharlotte Kigezo is a psychologist with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and counseling from Daystar University in Kenya. She is passionate about mental health and community-based programs that build for a strong mental and physical foundation for society.
As a mental health activist, she has concentrated on working on projects aimed at improving mental health with marginalized and less advantaged communities in Uganda, Kenya, and beyond. Sharlotte has been instrumental in facilitating trauma healing programs for refugee communities and art therapy programs for sexual crime victims. She has written and compiled a trauma healing guide incorporated in the #defyhatenow Cameroon edition Hate Speech Field guide and is currently developing on the trauma guide independently for the refugee community in northern Uganda (Rhino Camp). She is a consulting psychologist for a few radio stations in Arua (Uganda) and the in house psychologist for Platform Africa.
“We all need a platform to discover how much gold we have inside us and for me, Platform Africa represented its name. PLATFORMS”
Romeo Lomora Ronald
Programs manager
Romeo Lomora Ronald
Programs manager
Romeo is a 25 years old tech advocate, trainer and a teacher, before committing at Platform Africa, Romeo was an ICT teacher in South Sudan, In 2016 after arriving Rhino Camp refugee settlement in Uganda, Romeo took up teaching again utilizing limited resources for teaching sciences and digital literacy for his students mostly made up of South Sudanese and Congolese refugees. As a survivor of war and a traumatic past, Romeo is motivated to bend his energy towards bringing healing, hope, and skills for displaced communities. In his role as Programs Manager at Platform Africa, Romeo coordinates and develops different community impact programs and facilitating book tours as part of the #Kendatogether project as well as peacebuilding, and skills development programs. He is passionate about podcasting and poetry, in his free time he writes, sings, and dances with himself as the audience.
Emma Joel
Open tech trainer
Emma Joel
Open tech trainer
Emma Joel is an open tech trainer and community manager at platform Africa – He studied arts in high school but later diverted to pursue his passion for electrical management in Uganda. Emma currently runs Platform Africa’s #SkillsDev and STE(a)M education programs aimed at helping refugees develop transferable skills that are useful in increasing their prospects for employment but also impacting their education and therefore paving up pathways to new meaningful lives. His motivation for community service grew out of the need to fill skills and knowledge gaps in the refugee camp where he now lives and work, and to build hope.
Bridget Asema
Assistant Programs
Bridget Asema
Assistant Programs
Asema Amen Bridget is a Ugandan activist who is enthusiastic about community development, beauty, and fashion, women’s emancipation, and promotion of Girl-child education. She has worked with several organizations like Stanfield, the electoral commission, and Samuel hall East African as a research assistant which helped mold her professional competence in training, research, and public speaking. After a surge of refugees overflowed into her home district of Arua, she empathized with the situation and sensed she could employ her broad skills to empower and transform the refugee communities. In her position as an assistant program, Bridget works directly with our distinct partners to develop and design programs to promote peace, education, and skills development among the refugees.