Mwangi Peter Wanderi

Principal Corporate Services, Communication and Alumni Relations, Director Partnerships and Linkages, and Associate Professor

Mount Kenya University

2025 WES-NAFSA Fellow

Prof. Mwangi Peter Wanderi is the Principal Corporate Services, Communication and Alumni Relation and the Director Partnerships and Linkages, and an Associate Professor at Mount Kenya University (MKU). He has close to 40 years of research, teaching/ training and community engagement both in mainstream physical education and sports as well as in entrepreneurship and youth empowerment.

He has successfully supervised 24 Masters and 15 PhD Candidates and numerous postgraduate projects. He served as the Acting Vice-Chancellor at Mount Kenya University (MKU) between November 2019 and April 2020. To date, he has successfully coordinated several local and international, inter-disciplinary and multi-institutional projects at Mount Kenya University including serving as the Overseer of the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) SDG 10 Hub on Reduced Inequalities between 2021 and 2024; and currently the Overseer of the enhanced United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) SDG 9 Hub Chair on Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (2025 to 2027). These UNAI responsibilities’ key mandates include; a) engaging in the global championship of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) / Global Agenda in general, and b) specifically supporting the respective SDG activities across the globe. This has led to his series of presentations on SDGs in Japan (2021 & 2024 online), Ethiopia (2022), Nigeria (2022 & 2024), Uganda (2022), Tanzania (2023 twice), Estonia (2023), England (2023 twice – at Scotland and Leicester), Saudi Arabia (2024), Slovakia (2024), Rwanda (March 2025) and variously in Kenya since 2021.

He also serves as the MKU’s Graduate Enterprise Academy’s Overseer, which is MKU’s job creation forum. His most outstanding grant projects that he has won include Leuphana University’s (Germany) Students Training for Entrepreneurial Promotion (STEP), which he prides himself as having introduced in Kenya in 2012 hence his reputation as the Father of STEP in Kenya (2012 to 2025).

His numerous publications include a book chapter entitled, “Strategies for Integrating the SDGs into University Goals and Priorities: The Case of Mount Kenya University”, published in the NAFSA’s GLOBAL GOALS, GLOBAL EDUCATION: Advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2024) publication. He was instrumental in the establishment of Chandaria Business Innovation and Incubation Center at Kenyatta University prior to joining Mount Kenya University.