She has just received what could be translated as the “International Prize for Care”, the Global Nursing Award. In other words, that of the most deserving nurse awarded by the Indian medical foundation Aster DM. Anna Qabale Duba is 31 years old, and in addition to her vocation as a nurse, she is rewarded for her work in sex education with adolescent girls and their parents and for her career as a fighter.
She was born and raised in Torbi, a small remote village in northern Kenya, the last of a polygamous family of 19 children. At 12, she was circumcised. At 14, she escaped from the forced marriage her parents had prepared for her. At 16, she decided to become a nurse.
Kenyan Nurse, Anna Duba has won the $250,000 World’s Best Nurse Prize at the Aster Guardians Global Nursing Awards in Dubai.
She is the first ever winner of the award.
She works at Marsabit County Referral Hospital. pic.twitter.com/ZiP1mMc74m
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After studying at Kenya Methodist University, she became the first female graduate in her village. The Marsabit hospital hires her, and there, she realizes that all the patients have suffered the same thing as her: genital mutilation followed by a forced marriage as a minor. Excision is prohibited in Kenya, yet 91% of girls are still victims. “A scourge that is not easy to address publicly, so I said to myselfshe explains to the BBC, that the best way to militate, to get involved, was to use education.”
On the strength of her experience in the hospital, she therefore decided to return to her village and open a school there, where she gives lessons for the girls in the morning and for their parents in the afternoon. The same courses, which range from learning to read to understanding the human body. She explains everything, to mothers and fathers, reproduction, menstrual cycles, disease transmission, consent too.
Anna Qabale Duba fights to prevent rather than cure, she created her association to inspire other villages, and this is what earned her this award, accompanied by a prize of 250,000 dollars to finance her school.
The nine other finalists, Afghan, Indian, Australian, British or Emirati caregivers, received a prize of $ 5,000, to highlight, explains the Aster Foundation, this profession too often undervalued. The foundation estimates that 27 million women and men are nurses worldwide, representing more than half of health care workers, for pay that averages only a tenth of that doctors.