For the past 15 years, Fuambai Sia Ahmadu has enjoyed serving the SIerra Leone community in the Washington DC area, back home and around the world. A devoted mother to Issa Jr and wife of Gambian national, Ebrima Cambi, Dr. Ahmadu is also trained as a medical and symbolic anthropologist. She is currently the CEO of SiA Inc. which includes All Women are Free to Choose, a grassroots women's organization with country offices in Sierra Leone and The Gambia and seeking to expand in other sub-Sahara countries.
Dr. Ahmadu is also the Editor in-Chief of SiA Magazine that champions women’s rights to their cultural and religious traditions worldwide.
Dr. Ahmadu is an independent scholar who is regularly invited as a keynote speaker and guest lecturer at first rate universities around the world including Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, George Washington and American Universities here in the DC area and Yale, Columbia, Sigmund Freud University in Vienna and Charles University in Prague. She
has also served as a UN Adviser in The Gambia and Principal Investigator at the U.K.'s Medical Research Council Laboratories also based in The Gambia and worked at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland.
As a community leader in the DMV area, Dr. Ahmadu founded the Miss Sierra Leone in DC pageant which later expanded to the Miss Sierra Leone USA pageant and contributed over $15,000 in scholarships to titleholders. Dr. Ahmadu was also President of Kono Union USA, providing a legal, administrative and financial structure that had been non-existent for nearly 20 years. She is also a key organizer and member of the Secretariat of the successful Global Kono Conference in London and Washington DC.
As a political activist, Dr. Ahmadu was one of the founders of Concerned Sierra Leoneans helping to set the stage for change in the country. She became one of the handful of diaspora based founders of the new Coalition for Change (C4C) party that recently swept up all but one (contested) parliamentary seat in Kono District.
Dr. Ahmadu is one of a few SIerra Leoneans whose ideas have been the subject of global debates and is captured in the works of her colleagues and other personalities within academia and outside. Besides being the subject of scholarly writings, including those of Professor Richard Shweder who is Dr. Ahmadu’s eminent academic adviser based at the University of Chicago, her views and lived experience as well as those of Professor Shweder were the key inspiration for the recent critically acclaimed production Human Rites by playwright Seth Rozin at Interact Theater in Philadelphia.
Dr. Ahmadu is a sought after leader for her anthropological knowledge and expertise on gender and feminism. She has been invited as a special guest on several high profile news programs such as UK’s BBC Hardtalk with Stephen Sackur, BBC Global Questions in Kenya moderated by Zainab Badawi and Tucker Carlson on Fox TV in the US, the number one rated news show in the entire country.
Now at the height of her professional career, Dr. Ahmadu is currently serving as an expert witness in Detroit, Michigan in the nation’s first federal FGM case - on behalf of the defense in a high profile trial with great historic significance in the US and beyond. Her greatest achievement to date is her soon to be launched Kono Children’s Education Foundation (KCEF), which will provide badly needed scholarships and psychosocial support to academically gifted secondary school girls in Kono District.
Congratulations FSA!!!
