Afua took advantage of her school's motto to 'Aim High', and was the first person from her school in 10 years to get into Oxbridge. Over the years, she has gone on to craft a career she loves.
Through Sambamba Consulting and Coaching, she uses her professional training and experience in coaching, education and consulting to empower ambitious individuals to take action at critical points in their education, career and life, to craft their own destinies and honour their true selves.
Her career coaching clients are typically women in the mid stages of their career, looking to pivot or progress, to get to where they really want to be.
Her consulting work with schools helps students to make more informed career decisions, and high achieving students to increase their chances of success when applying to Oxbridge.
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[00:00:00] The sociology teacher encouraged you to go to Oxford, you got in. You're one of the only
[00:00:06] people to get in in 10 years. That must be like an amazing achievement.
[00:00:12] And what did you do? What did you do remind me what you did at
[00:00:16] remind us what you did at Cambridge University?
[00:00:19] Yeah, so I read Laura at Cambridge and looking back on it actually at the time I was also interested
[00:00:24] in sociology. I was interested in politics but I thought I'd go down the law route. You
[00:00:29] know what it's like with a compare. I think I mentioned to my mum that I wanted to be a
[00:00:34] sociologist and that didn't go down well. So when I was younger she used to call me pocket lawyer
[00:00:40] and that's quite typical pocket lawyer always have an answer for something. So although I did
[00:00:45] Laura at university, I was also interested in politics and sociology and other things. I think
[00:00:50] looking back now I maybe would have done a different degree but it was definitely a good
[00:00:54] degree to do and a good degree to have. And I did look into going into the legal sector as
[00:00:59] a practitioner so I thought about the solicitors route and I had some work experience but after
[00:01:04] doing it I thought this isn't quite a good match for me. So I ended up doing a program called
[00:01:09] Teach First and at the time it was the we were the first year to do it so part of the
[00:01:14] inaugural cohort and it was a teaching program where you trained to be a secondary
[00:01:19] school teacher but it was also a leadership development program so I really liked that
[00:01:24] element of it and that appealed to me to have almost the best of both worlds.
[00:01:28] Brilliant okay cool so you know you did so you did law at Cambridge which is always a safe bet
[00:01:34] and lots of friends that did law and now they're doing something completely different with
[00:01:37] this marketing or working in media PR comms etc but you of course you went into teaching
[00:01:43] and you really enjoyed it and yeah and then you've kind of built some type of you know leadership
[00:01:49] career on the back of that okay. So after Teach First is that how you ended up what you're doing now?
[00:01:58] Yeah so it's interesting because obviously today we're talking about career pivoting and
[00:02:01] there's definitely different points in my career where I have pivoted so I stayed in
[00:02:06] education for about eight to nine years and even though education is great for having a really
[00:02:13] clear career path if you want to stay in it I always thought okay I want to develop my skills
[00:02:18] a bit further let me think about what I like let me think about what I'm good at let me think
[00:02:23] about what's going well for me but I also want to have the opportunity to develop new skills
[00:02:28] so I ended up spending the summer holiday that year when I left Teach In doing a program
[00:02:35] called National Citizen Service which supports students in year 11 so 16 year olds to do a summer
[00:02:42] program where they develop themselves personally and they do that through different activities
[00:02:47] and I was a team manager on one of those programs so as I got to know the program more and got to
[00:02:53] know the organization more I ended up going to work for them doing initially fundraising
[00:02:58] actually which I had no experience in whatsoever. What was the fun reason for?
[00:03:04] Yeah so working with the young people so it was the program so it was a subsidized program so
[00:03:11] the government paid a lot and contributed a lot towards it but it was to help us and enable
[00:03:17] the program to stay at the low price but also they were setting up an alumni ambassadors program
[00:03:25] so some of the funding was going towards that ambassador program so I thought right let me try
[00:03:31] my hand at something a bit new and different and then I ended up also doing a bit of public affairs
[00:03:36] and communications too. Okay so was that after after you worked on that program?
[00:03:42] Yeah so I've worked on it in the summer and then I was looking at my next steps what do I
[00:03:46] want to do and for me the mission of an organization is really important to me
[00:03:52] so I like to think okay what are my personal values what's really important to me within a
[00:03:56] career and then I choose roles based on the ones that I feel align really well with my values so it
[00:04:02] was teach first initially and then this organization which was called the challenge that I went on to
[00:04:07] work with. Awesome you know actually I've heard of the challenge you know someone had a friend
[00:04:13] I've got a friend that worked at the challenge years ago and now he's running a youth
[00:04:22] like a youth center if you're in south London. Okay yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah so I can tell that
[00:04:30] you like to be involved with things where you can make impacts and it comes with purpose as well
[00:04:36] and what are what you mentioned for like values like you like to be in roles or you like to be
[00:04:42] involved in organizations where there's values so it's good to talk more about your values
[00:04:46] that you believe in. Yeah and you've already touched upon one of them which is being able
[00:04:50] to make some kind of an impact so that's something that's really important to me and I know that looks
[00:04:56] different for different people but for me it's about making an impact both on the individual
[00:05:01] that I'm working with so when I was teaching my students when I was doing the NCS program the
[00:05:06] young people going through the program and then the alumni afterwards so being able to make some
[00:05:11] kind of impact either on an individual or a wider community is really important to me.
[00:05:16] I think another thing that's important to me is some kind of investment in somebody's future
[00:05:23] so thinking about where they're at now thinking about what potential they have to to develop and
[00:05:29] grow and really being a part of that process and investing in whatever their future goals or
[00:05:35] their future desires are so that's one of the things that really led to me setting up
[00:05:39] Sanbamba which we can talk about a little bit later on.
[00:05:42] And then yeah it's got a nice ring. Just always makes you want to do like a little
[00:05:51] my friends who know me well know that I love Brazil as well so I spent a bit of time.