Kenya's Kipruto wins Rome marathon

Kenya's Kipruto wins Rome marathon

Amos Kipruto wins the 2016 Rome Marathon on April 10, 2016. PHOTO | IAAF

In Summary

Kipruto weathered a seven-man assault when he broke away at 35km to triumph in more than a minute and effectively ended Ethiopia’s three-year dominance in the race in his first attempt at marathon.

Kipruto, who arrived in Rome in great form, having paced the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon through 30km in 1:27:30, edged out Ethiopia’s Birhanu Addisie to second in 2:09:27.

Kenya’s Dominic Ruto sealed the podium place in 2:09:28 as Rahma Tusa of Ethiopia won the women’s race in 2:28:49.

Kenya’s Amos Kipruto cruised to victory in Rome, clocking 2:08:12 on Sunday.

Kipruto weathered a seven-man assault when he broke away at 35km to triumph in more than a minute to end Ethiopia’s three-year dominance in the race in his first attempt in marathon.

Luka Kanda was the last Kenyan to have won in 2012 before Kipruto reclaimed the pride.

Kipruto, who arrived in Rome in great form, having paced the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon through 30km in 1:27:30, edged out Ethiopia’s Birhanu Addisie to second in 2:09:27.

Kenya’s Dominic Ruto sealed the podium place in 2:09:28 in a race where Rahma Tusa, of Ethiopia, won the women’s race in 2:28:49. Mulu Diro Melka, also from Ethiopia, was second clocking 2:29:59.

The Ethiopian women maintained their dominance over Kenya for the third year running in the race. Helena Kiprop is the last Kenyan women to have won the race in 2013.

Kenyan Team Wins 2nd Place, $10,000 in Wege Prize 2016 Michigan, USA

Kenyan Team Wins 2nd Place, $10,000 in Wege Prize 2016 Michigan, USA

Five Kenyan women currently studying abroad at different colleges and universities around the world are working together to improve living conditions in the impoverished urban areas of their home country, and their efforts recently earned them 2nd place and $10,000 in Wege Prize 2016, a global student design competition focused on the circular economy.

Organized by Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University’s (KCAD’s) Wege Center for Sustainable Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, Wege Prize challenges teams of undergraduate students from around the world to work across institutional and disciplinary boundaries, converging their knowledge and perspectives to design a product, service, or business model that can function within and facilitate a paradigm shift toward a circular economy, an economic model in which resources and capital are regenerative.

Named Kenyan Youths for a Circular Economy, or KYCE, the team of Stephanie Ageng’o, studying Law at Anglia Ruskin University in the United Kingdom; Lavender Micalo, studying Biochemistry at Roanoke College in the United States; Lydiah Mpyisi, studying Environmental Science and Biology at Roanoke College; Kathleen Murarya, studying Mathematics and Science at Westchester Community College in the United States; and Phenny Omondi, studying Agronomy and Environmental Science at EARTH University in Costa Rica, unveiled an ambitious plan to improve the poor economic and sanitary conditions of Kibera, Kenya’s largest urban slum, where each of the women were born and have spent a majority of their lives.

In Kibera, overpopulation, poverty, and a lack of proper sanitation facilities has resulted in a number of growing environmental and personal health problems including disease, pollution, and lack of access to clean water.

“Our team originally met at the Millennium Campus Conference in New York City at the United Nations headquarters, and during the conference we began talking about how we could come together as Kenyan youths to help our country achieve the sustainability goals that were adopted by the UN in 2015. A few months later we heard about Wege Prize and wanted to get involved,” said Micalo.

Mpyisi, who presented her team’s solution in the final stage of the competition, added, ““We wanted to integrate existing community-based organizations and work together with the government and the locals to come up with solutions that can disrupt the existing wicked problems in Kenya’s urban slums.”

By orchestrating a collaboration between Peepoople, a nonprofit that manufactures and distributes portable toilets that transform human waste into valuable fertilizer; The Community Cooker Foundation, a nonprofit that works to provide communities with bio-digesters that can transform environmental waste into energy; and the Kenyan government, KYCE plans to pave the way for a circular system in which Kibera’s most formidable problems can become assets for growth and development.

Using the Community Cooker Foundation’s bio-digesters, Kibera’s environmental waste would be upcycled into inexpensive and clean heat energy that would provide residents with a means of cooking food and boiling water for safe consumption. Using Peepoople’s Pepoo product, a biodegradable and self-sanitizing human waste receptacle that inactivates harmful pathogens, would give Kibera’s residents an affordable and sanitary means of relieving themselves and allow human waste that is currently polluting the environment to be upcycled as fertilizer for large community gardens that would take the place of existing urban landfills.

 “We really appreciated that team KYCE chose to work on a problem in a context that they had personal connection to,” said judge Gretchen Hooker, who works as a Biomimicry Specialist for the Biomimicry Institute. “Their system redesign leverages existing resources in the community in new ways and meets an acute need affecting many people.”

KYCE has already begun connecting with Peepoople, The Community Cooker, and local Kenyan governments to put their plan into action. They hope to use the funds awarded in Wege Prize 2016 to help officially solidify the necessary partnerships and resources to move their idea forward.

“We’re now going to start finalizing all of our partnerships on paper, and we also want to take steps to ensure that our project is sustainable, and that the change we want to see happen in Kibera actually does happen,” said Mpyisi. “Being named a finalist in a global competition like Wege Prize really gave us a voice to approach these organizations and prove to them that our idea is worth listening to.”

Other winning solutions in Wege Prize 2016 included a solution that focuses on creating an on-site waste treatment system for hospitals that minimizes environmental impact while maximizing the ability of the system to recover resources, and a solution that would help Technology for Tomorrow Ltd.,  an existing company in Uganda that manufactures sanitary pads out of papyrus, adopt a circular model for meeting the heating and electricity needs of its production facilities through biomass gasification of papyrus and paper waste materials.

Thanks to the generous support of The Wege Foundation, which recently awarded $444,000 in grant funding to KCAD’s Wege Center for Sustainable Design to continue running the competition for the next four years, Wege Prize 2017 will be open to any undergraduate student in the world, and will again be focused on the circular economy.

Team registration will open in August 2016, but those interested in participating are encouraged to begin building their teams and brainstorming ideas now. Educators and other professionals who are interested in contributing their expertise are encouraged to contact wicked@wegeprize.org for more information.

Wege Prize - 17 Fountain St. NW, Grand Rapids, MI 49503 - wicked@wegeprize.org

Wege Prize is a West Michigan-born concept developed by
Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University (KCAD) with the support of The Wege Foundation.

May 25, 2016
by Kyle Austin

 

Young Kenyan researcher wins prestigious international fellowship at UCT

Young Kenyan researcher wins prestigious international fellowship at UCT

Dr Nadia Chanzu will be investigating why HIV-positive pregnant women on antiretroviral therapy are at particular risk of pre-term births, while on a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at UCT, sponsored by the AXA Research Fund.

Nearly one million babies died in 2013 due to complications related to premature (pre-term) birth, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates. For HIV-infected mothers, the risk of giving birth prematurely is extremely high, putting these babies at risk of increased episodes of illness and death. In order to develop alternative therapies to counter this risk, scientists need a better understanding of the delicate immune balance between an HIV-positive mother and her developing baby. It is to do exactly this that the AXA Research Fund awarded Dr Nadia Chanzu, currently a research scientist at the Gertrude's Children's Hospital in Kenya, a prestigious two-year junior (postdoctoral) fellowship at UCT's Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine.

The AXA Research Fund, the research-funding branch of the global insurance brand, seeks to contribute to a greater understanding and prevention of risk worldwide, including environmental, life and socio-economic risk. Fellowships are one of the instruments through which they attempt to achieve this aim. Chanzu is the first African researcher at an African university to be awarded this highly competitive and prestigious fellowship.

The AXA Scientific Board, in awarding the fellowship to Chanzu, described her as a "very promising young scientist" with "significant potential".

"It is a great honour," says Chanzu, who graduated among the top of her class in medical biochemistry from the University of Nairobi in Kenya, completed her master's degree in biomedical science at Kingston University in London (UK) and went on to complete her PhD at the University of Nairobi Institute of Tropical and Infectious Diseases with a grant award from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada. Chanzu is also a graduate of the prestigious Canadian Institutes of Health Research's International Infectious Diseases and Global Health Training Programme (IID & GHTP), which sponsors exceptional PhD trainees across Canada, Colombia, Kenya and India.

"I will use this time to improve my knowledge, skills and experience and eventually contribute towards the advancement of the research agenda in my own country."

Thirty-five million people around the world are HIV positive, according to WHO statistics: of those, nearly 71% live in sub-Saharan Africa, making Chanzu's research particularly relevant on the continent.

Today HIV can be successfully managed with the use of anti-retroviral therapy (ART): however, says Chanzu, the ART exposure, along with the HIV, appears to increase the risk of premature birth.

"The placenta is the only link between the developing child and its mother," she explains. "But because a baby will inherit some components from its father – components that are foreign to the mother – the baby and the mother are at risk of rejecting one another."

A successful pregnancy therefore requires a delicate immune balance between mother and baby – a balance that HIV and ART exposure may disrupt.

"My research aims to identify some of the altered immune mechanisms within the placentae of HIV-infected women, in comparison with those of HIV-negative mothers, to better understand the immune basis of pre-term births in HIV-positive women."

Chanzu's research will have a direct impact on public health, hopefully providing a foundation to inform alternative therapies and alleviate the risks associated with pregnancy in HIV-infected mothers. She says South Africa, and UCT in particular, is the ideal place for her to continue this research.

"South Africa has developed into a hub of groundbreaking HIV-prevention research with some of the leading global infectious diseases experts residing at the University of Cape Town," she says. "Having the opportunity to undertake the AXA Fellowship at UCT at the Division of Immunology, under the mentorship of Professor Clive Gray and Dr Heather Jaspan, will give me access to cutting-edge technology and expertise that is currently lacking in my home country, Kenya."

Story by Natalie Simon

Today’s news, 22 June 2015

About us: Breakthru Kenya blog

About us: Breakthru Kenya blog

E-mail: seriking15@gmail.com or davidwise111@yahoo.com; Mobile: +2348091143856

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Breakthru Kenya blog identifies and showcases new and progressive feats and advancements in Kenya and by Kenyans.

Breakthru Kenya blog promotes and celebrates remarkable and outstanding exploits and achievements by Kenya and her citizens, irrespective of their place of residence.

Home and abroad, Kenyans are accomplishing unimaginable feats that remain unreported and unknown to their country, government and citizens. The country is equally taking positive development steps which her citizens and the world at large are unaware of. Breakthru Kenya, therefore, records these developments and feats by Kenya and Kenyans with the objective of kindling hope in the citizens as well as inspiring confidence in the nation.

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A piece of news, in spite of how old it might appear, remains a news material - if you are yet to hear it or you are just hearing it. We, therefore, publish works on this blog not minding the date, as we intend not only to bring to the fore but also to document and also inform about every breakthrough made by Kenyans and Kenya in and outside their country, particularly as gleaned from various media sources or offered by organisations or individuals.

We urge you, therefore, to follow us on this blog and read our posts as well as also recognise such Kenyan (breakthru) men/women and their works by posting your responses or comments as a mark of honour to these heroes and heroines of our country.

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Senatla shines in a weekend of ups and downs for Blitzboks

• ANTOINETTE MULLER
• 16 MAY 2016 12:09 (SOUTH AFRICA)

The World Series Sevens might be coming to an end, but preparation for Rio is only just beginning. Seabelo Senatla was the shining light for the Blitzboks at the weekend, but against a physical Samoan side, South Africa came up well short. It might be just the wake-up call they need to know what part of their game needs some tinkering as Rio begins to loom ever larger. By ANTOINETTE MULLER.

On a weekend that will probably be considered as the most topsy turvy of this season’s World Series Sevens circuit, Seabelo Senatla stole the show, despite the fact that South Africa crashed out in the quarterfinals of the Paris Sevens.

The Blitzboks had to settle for winning the plate final against Australia, and with just one round of matches remaining – to be played in London next weekend – it seems unlikely that they will catch up front runners Fiji who still sit atop the table despite losing to Samoa in the final in Paris.

It was a weekend full of surprises, with Kenya nearly beating New Zealand in the group stages, Samoa beating South Africa in the quarterfinals and Australia running Fiji close, ending off with an incredible 29-26 win for Samoa over Fiji in the final on Sunday evening.

The Blitzboks were electric on the first two days with Senatla particularly impressive across the tournament. On day one against England, Senatala crossed the whitewash four times, and he added two more against Australia on day two. There are not enough words to praise Senatala’s awareness. Having pace is one thing, but knowing how to exploit every nook and cranny of space when you have the ball in hand takes a truly special kind of player and nobody does it better than Senatla.

He is miles ahead for tries scored this season – with 64 to his name. To put that into context, the US’s Perry Baker is second with 40. Senatla also has more points than any other player – 320 – with Canada’s Nathan Hirayama in second with 295. Senatla has also made 70 clean breaks this season, 22 ahead of Perry Baker's 52.

There is no doubt that Senatla is the heartbeat of this South African team. While Cecil Afrika can sidestep a Ferrari, Senatla can tap around the speed of sound. Even more phenomenal is the fact that he is only 23 years old and already sits in the top 10 (ninth) of most tries ever scored in the World Seven series, having gone over the whitewash 155 times in his career. If he is managed correctly and looked after, there is no doubt that Senatla will go down as one of the most incredible players ever to play the Sevens game.

But with great speed comes great responsibility and on Sunday against Samoa, though, things came undone for the South Africans. When a player is so exceptionally talented, it can become a bit of a habit to be overly reliant on him. The Blitzboks seemed almost overly-reliant on their speedster and followed a far too predictable approach of passing the ball to Senatla as often as possible.

While there is nothing wrong with depending on your in-form player, these fixtures are supposed to be the time when South Africa test out new tricks in the lead-up to the Rio Olympics.

When Senatla is out in space, South Africa are superb, but up against more physical teams like Samoa, they struggle to find a way around. On Sunday, this is exactly where they fell short. In the quarterfinal, as frustration grew, they conceded a number of breakdown penalties and had to settle for a 10-21 loss.

In the plate final against Australia, they rekindled their free-flowing play, clinching a 17-7 win to win the plate final. While the loss against Samoa will sting, especially in terms of what that means for the Blitzboks in this season’s World Series tournament, it is not the worst thing that could have happened.

If there is one thing this team has done well since triumphing in Cape Town last year, it’s improving when they get knocked down. Not many teams South Africa will face take as much of a physical approach as Samoa, but at least now they have been there and done that and will know that their fleet-footed approach will not work against a side constantly out to crush bones. DM

Photo: South Africa's Seabelo Senatla scores a try against Samoa during their men's rugby sevens medal semi-final at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland, July 27, 2014. REUTERS/Russell Cheyne.

• ANTOINETTE MULLER

Kenya Law Shines at the ICJ Uwazi Football Tournament

Kenya Law Shines at the ICJ Uwazi Football Tournament

JUNE 3, 2016

Kenya Law scooped the 2^nd runners up prize during in the 2016 edition of the Annual International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) ‘Uwazi Cup’ tournament held on 14^th May 2016 at the  Safaricom Stadium, Kasarani.

The Uwazi Cup brings together teams from various stakeholders involved in the administration of justice, including the judiciary, law schools, the police, parliament, NGOs and the media.

Kenya Law emerged top in the group stages after beating The Senate, The Centre for Rights, Education and Awareness (CREAW) and Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU) teams. At the quarter final stage, the team beat Safaricom Ltd football team, and sailed through to the semifinals where it was humbled by Ghetto radio football team through a penalty shoot-out.

Finally, at the third and fourth play offs, Kenya Law overpowered the Kenya School of Law team to clinch the second runners up position.

Well done Kenya Law team!

Lagos City Marathon 2016: Kenyan athlete, Abraham Kipton emerges winner

Lagos City Marathon 2016:

Kenyan athlete, Abraham Kipton emerges winner 

 Lagos witnessed local and international athletes unite today, February 6, 2016 for the Lagos City Marathon, hosted by the state government.

Abraham Kipton who’s from Kenya emerged as the winner, running 2hrs 16mins, 21seconds.

The winner, Abraham Kator of Kenya crossed the finish line @ 2hrs 16mins & 21secs

 Kenya’s Hossei and Ethiopia’s Debebe Ethosa came in second and third respectively, while Emmanuel Gyang, the first Nigerian to cross the finish line came in 7^th place.

 The 20,000 participants started the race from the National Stadium in Surulere, BUT not all partakers could make it up to the finish line – Eko Atlantic City in Victoria Island – as majority backed out before the 3^rd mainland bridge. LOL!

See if there’s an athlete stuck in front of your house!

Hassan Sanusi, February 06 2016