By Alumni Office

Guided by purpose, progress and prosperity, Mrs. Diana Kolek - Olwangu is a Business Coach, a Business Strategy Consultant, and a Purpose Coach. She is also a Conference Speaker and Transformational Trainer. She has an immense wealth of knowledge and experience in business development, strategy planning, implementation & evaluation, product development, negotiation, partnership and linkages management among other skills.

Kolek is the Founder and Lead Consultant at Evoke Global, a training and consulting firm that works with entrepreneurs to strengthen their capacity to build sustainable, scalable and profitable businesses through business development services.
Through her leadership, Evoke has been able to train and consult with over 200 female entrepreneurs. Additionally, she has been able to establish partnerships with other organizations in order to secure access to financing and loans to women led businesses in Kenya.

She is also the General Manager for Kenpoise Management Services LTD, a subsidiary of Poise Nigeria. Kenpoise is a soft skills training and management consultancy firm, that is in the business of enhancing the skills of professionals in organizations and helping them exude executive presence.

She is passionate about helping SMEs and Mid-sized businesses develop, implement and evaluate their business strategies, get clarity of purpose, evoke their brilliance, develop a powerful sales machine, develop systems and structures that will systematically drive their businesses to profitability, sustainability, scalability and prosperity.

Kolek has built a network of female entrepreneurs under the umbrella of Women Building Legacy Businesses and also runs a weekly show on digital media, ‘The Process Show’. In this show she features different individuals and entrepreneurs to provide insights and valuable lessons to other entrepreneurs.

Moreover, Kolek is a Senior Adviser with Youth Alliance for Leadership and Development in Africa (YALDA), an organization with branches in over 15 countries in Africa and the Diaspora. She finds joy in helping young people discover their purpose and how they can align it to the future careers or businesses. She works with different high schools and universities through the YALDA network.

Additionally, she has worked for USIU-Africa for 14 years in different roles in the Finance Department, the latest being the Credit Control Officer, where she initiated the process of developing the credit control policy and the standard operating procedures thereof. This facilitated the increase in collection of student current debt to an average of 95% every semester. USIU-Africa has a great influence in shaping her leadership through the many roles she served in, including as the chair of the USIU SACCO supervisory committee. She also served as a panelist for the 10,000 Women Program, a USIU-Africa initiated program in partnership with Goldman Sachs and Centre for Executive & Entrepreneurial Development (CEED). She served as a student selection panelist for the MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program at USIU-Africa.

During her tenure as an employee at USIU-Africa she served as the Patron of YALDA USIU-Africa branch. She was then appointed as the 1st East African Regional Associate for YALDA International because of her exemplary work for YALDA in East Africa. She launched branches in Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya. She also supported the Ugandan branch especially during the YALDA International conference in Uganda. Diana also participated in the organizing of the YALDA International conferences in Uganda, Nigeria, Botswana and Kenya.

She holds an MBA in Strategic Management (Class of 2015) and a Bachelor’s Degree in Information Systems and Technology from USIU-Africa. She also has certification in Strategic Management from the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business. During her spare time, she loves to dance to the salsa tunes, travel, watch movies and play with her daughter.