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Nina Mbah

Location:
Nigeria
Languages:
English
Issues:
Climate Change
Expertise:
Impact Producing, Consulting, Impact Strategist/Advisor, Campaign Implementation, Alternative Distribution, Training, Impact evaluation
Cultural/racial identity:
African
Self identification:
Female

Bio

Nina Mbah is an Impact Producer, Social Entrepreneur, and Co-founder of African Climate Stories. She works at one of the most urgent intersections of our time: storytelling, behavioural change, and environmental sustainability.

Nina doesn't just produce stories, she makes them work. Her impact campaigns span films, TV, games, XR, and even story books designed to move people from awareness to action on climate and environmental challenges. At African Climate Stories, she leads strategic vision, impact design, and program development. Everything she builds is grounded in systems thinking, community realities, and outcomes that can actually be measured.

That approach comes from watching African cities absorb the daily cost of environmental neglect, including flooding, power cuts, and communities left out of global climate conversations. That reality shapes everything she does.

Right now, she's putting that to the test in one of Africa's most pressing energy crises. 9 out of 10 Nigerians live without reliable electricity. Through the "Flip the Switch" campaign, Nina is using storytelling and community participation to drive Nigeria's clean energy transition, and push that number to zero.

She is also building the infrastructure to make this kind of work possible at scale. Under her co-leadership, African Climate Stories has grown into a pan-African ecosystem spanning over 16 countries, with more than 50 local partnerships. Its flagship programs, the African Climate Stories Fellowship, Festival, and Flip Campaign, form a replicable model for culture-driven climate action. The organisation has engaged thousands of young people, inspired hundreds of climate solution ideas, and carried narrative-driven sustainability messaging across multiple African regions. Its funders and partners include the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, IKEA Foundation, Carbon Trust, Urban Movement Innovation Fund, Embassy of France in Nigeria, and the Zero Emissions Generators (ZE-Gen).

Global recognition for these efforts has followed. Nina is a 2026 Rockefeller Foundation Big Bet Fellow, a 2025 World Bank–Max Thabiso Edkins Climate Ambassador, and a 2024 awardee of one of 18 Women Championing Sustainable Solutions in Africa, named by WeForGood International. She currently works part-time as an Impact Strategist and Impact Producer for Generation Africa 2.0, a pan-African documentary film initiative by South African non-profit media organisation STEPS, featuring 30 documentary projects across 21 African countries focused on climate justice and environmental action. She served as a social films category jury member at the 2025 Sehsüchte Film Festival in Potsdam, Germany. At the UNLEASH SDGs Innovation Lab, she co-designed "Track-Trash," a real-time waste monitoring solution tackling flooding in Jodhpur, India. She also facilitates sustainability-in-filmmaking training and lectures at the International Screen Institute's Sustainability Management Programme in Vienna, Austria.

Her thinking is built on an unusual foundation. Nina holds a degree in Quantity Surveying alongside postgraduate diplomas in Human Capital Development and in Entrepreneurship, Technology & Design from the Nigerian University of Technology and Management. She also holds a certification from the School of System Change London, where she studied systems thinking and collective transformation. Though her disciplines are diverse, she has one clear direction.

In practice, her work means three things: impact strategy and campaign design, outcome tracking and impact evaluation, and coalition building for systems change. She brings all of it, whether working with filmmakers from the earliest stages of development, or with organisations whose content already exists but hasn't yet reached the people it was made for.

Maybe you're still developing your story and want to build impact in from the start. Or you've already made something powerful, but it's not landing where it should. Either way, you have a message and a mission, but no clear path from story to impact.

That's exactly where Nina comes in. She works with you from development to distribution to make sure your content moves communities, or shifts policy, and creates change that can be measured, change that saves and transforms lives.

If you're a funder, filmmaker, artist, researcher, community organiser, or you believe stories can drive real change, you should be connecting with Nina Mbah.