Daniel Majok Gai

PES New Emerging Leader: Sudan Program Director

Daniel came to the United States as a twenty-year-old refugee in 2001. At the age of six, he had escaped into the bush alone when a northern militia attacked his South Sudanese village. He spent the next fourteen years in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, having trekked hundreds of miles, first into Ethiopia, and then, when the “Lost Boys” were driven out of that region, to the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Daniel received his high school certificate in Kakuma, where he learned under a tree, without pens or paper.

Daniel became a United States citizen in 2007 and recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Denver with a BA in Psychology where he will continue his graduate work. At UCD, he won the 2010 Rosa Park Diversity Student Award and worked as a Student Advocate at the Educational Opportunity Program. Daniel is a board member of PES and has returned to Sudan twice as part of the PES team, where he met with village elders to negotiate PES’s third school site; assisted with the teacher training and women’s literacy programs; provided training to the PES Sudanese Field Coordinator. In 2008, Project Education Sudan reunited Daniel with his family.

After being selected by Leadership Institute of New Sudan (LIONS), JKSIS University of Denver, to participate in an emergent leadership development program at Juba University in South Sudan, Daniel was appointed the Sudan Program Director for Project Education Sudan. In February 2011, he will travel to Sudan for one year to work in conjunction with PES Sudan Field Coordinator Panther Kelei to oversee and monitor PES projects on the ground.

“I am sure the relationships I made during his leadership training in Juba will create a network beneficial to Project Education Sudan’s goals in the future. My biggest hope is to see the Sudanese people prosper, and I believe I can be an emerging leader for my country’s development.” – Daniel Majok Gai