Nolwazi Mjwara Bridges Communications, Culture and Sustainable Development at UNESCO
Nolwazi Mjwara builds on journalism background to come full circle with UNESCO career.
Nolwazi Mjwara had been working as a journalist in South Africa when she decided to come to Paris to pursue a Master’s in Global Communications (MAGC) at AUP. With an academic background in media, writing, film studies and psychology, and a passion for sustainable development, the MAGC program, for which she was awarded a scholarship, was ideal for her to develop her academic qualifications and launch her future international career. Nolwazi’s time at AUP culminated with a thesis involving field work in Nairobi thanks to a Slosberg Grant, and a prestigious internship in communications at UNESCO where she has been working ever since.
After graduating, Nolwazi was hired as a communications consultant at UNESCO and was recently appointed as associate press officer for culture, a role that brings her previous career experience full circle. “I started off as a journalist and now I’m the one preparing press releases,” she explains. Nolwazi’s daily work involves responding to queries from journalists to UNESCO about culture, including World Heritage sites, the creative economy and cultural diversity to help them tell their stories, and organizing press briefings and press conferences. She has recently issued press releases on the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral and the last G20 conference in Brazil.
She explains that a UNESCO working group on culture recently led to a declaration adopted by the G20 countries, committing them to integrate cultural policies for sustainable development through UNESCO’s mandate. “UNESCO is a privileged partner,” she adds. “My role is about building peace through UNESCO’s mandate and communication, with culture at the core; it’s about peacebuilding and engaging the public through the press.”
She links this mission involving what unites all of humanity - our shared cultural heritage, to what she grew up with under Nelson Mandela’s vision of a “rainbow nation” meaning a culturally diverse nation and to what she experienced at AUP, where she found herself in an incredibly diverse and culturally rich environment class of 20 students with 25 nationalities, as she recalls. This theme and motif of multiculturalism is also apparent in her work at UNESCO with 194 Member States working through multilateralism for world peace.
Nolwazi recognizes the ways in which her studies at AUP prepared her to work in the dynamic and inclusive environment of the United Nations, in particular thanks to the Sustainable Development Practicum, which took her to Auroville, India to study sustainability through development first-hand. In addition to having the world in her office, her role at UNESCO allows her to travel the world, some examples include the Galapagos Islands, presenting the Ocean Pledge at the UN General Assembly in New York, and covering the World Heritage Committees in Saudi Arabia and India.
“I knew I wanted to work in sustainable development and chose the MAGC development track at AUP and now am working on the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals through my work,” she explains. “And I am very happy in my role. It is a joy to work for the Culture sector through the Press Office, also coming from South Africa where Mandela had to reunite a country and a culture. I am very honored to have my passion, qualification and job intertwine.” Looking back on her time at AUP, she credits her professors, her classmates, the AUP and CECI scholarship, family, friends and her mentor who worked at UNESCO. “I am who I am because of AUP,” she says, citing “Ubuntu,” a philosophy according to which we are who we are because of the people in our community, as a guiding principle for her. Nolwazi has now also become a mentor to current AUP students to further strengthen this sense of community and to help current students find their path to a meaningful career, just as she did.