BREAKING:The only Female in her VILLAGE to be educated and in her family won the world’s Best Nurse Award

A Kenyan nurse who campaigns against early marriage and Female Genital Mutilation has won the first-ever Global Nursing Awards. Anna Qabale Duba won a $250,000 prize at an award ceremony held in Dubai on International Nurses day. Anna Duba said that she planned to spend the money on starting a maternity shelter, adding, “in my region, 99% of women still deliver at home due to lack of services, so I want to bridge this gap.”

Mouthpiece NGR learnt that this is Anna Duba’s second high-profile prize, having won the Global citizens’ People’s Choice Award in New York in 2019.The Kenyan nurse fighting FGM was crowned world’s best nurse. She beat more than 24,000 nominees to the Aster Guardians Global Nursing Award.

Anna’s colleagues say she always goes the extra mile for others in her pastoralist community in the northern county of marsabit, and runs a school in her village. She was the only university-educated girl from Torbi village, and the only girl to be educated past primary school level in her family of 19 children. She now holds a master in Epidemiology and has set up a foundation aimed at empowering young girls and mothers.

Working as a nurse at Marsabit county Referral Hospital, she strives to end harmful cultural practices such as Female Genital Mutilation and early marriage, and it is for her work in this area that Dubai-based DM health-care bestowed her their Global Nursing Award.

Anna Duba is from Torbi, northern Kenya. She had first hand experience of being subjected to FGM when she was just 12 years old. Although, FGM is illegal in Kenya, over 90% of women and girls in the northern counties of the country have been subjected to FGM according to Kenyan Anti-FGM board. It was gathered that she also escaped a forced marriage at the age of 14 and she is the only female in her village to go to university and only girl in her family to be educated beyond primary school.