There are some words that just don’t slide off the tongue with ease – and actuary is one of them. The backbone of the insurance industry, actuaries are the professionals responsible for calculating risk that then drives the development of premiums that people pay for insurance cover. It is a dream for math lovers. Mukami Njeru is one of them – people who thrive in the world of numbers, derivatives and calculations, and what they could represent.
While at Loreto Limuru Girls High she applied for an architecture degree, then a chance conversation led her to actuarial science. She was intrigued; it sounded right up her alley, and when she got her results she applied to the three year actuarial science programme at the University of Nairobi. Her parents were initially against the idea given that they had also never heard of the degree, but she managed to convince them and enrolled. She sailed through her four years and graduated in 2007 with a First Class Honours. But that was just part one. Similar to the accounting field, professional qualification is attained by a series of professional exams; fifteen of them to be precise. It is a notoriously difficult qualification to pursue, even for the math whizzes, evidenced by there being just 35 actuaries in the country yet this is the highest number in Sub Saharan Africa outside of South Africa.
Mukami’s professional journey started off at Pricewaterhouse Coopers where she advocated for secondment to PWC offices in Australia so she could understudy others in her chosen profession. It was the right move as she learnt the craft first-hand with mentoring and support that would have been difficult in Kenya given the paucity of certified actuaries. After five years of exams and practice across three countries, Mukami achieved her dream. Though she was not the only woman in her university class to graduate with the degree, she was the first to go through all stages of her proficiency and she qualified as a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in 2012 – the first Kenyan woman to do so.
While she has worked in a number of major insurance companies including being Group Actuary at CIC, Mukami at heart is passionate about the profession which led her serve as Secretary of the Council with The Actuarial Society of Kenya (TASK). Through this she supports other actuaries who require mentorship to succeed in the rigorous professional exams. The good news – many more women are following in her steps and the profession overall is on an upward trend locally. We celebrate Mukami Njeru for bucking the trend and qualifying as Kenya’s first female actuary. In her words she achieved her dream by God’s grace and now is paying it forward by making way for others to reach similar heights.