Offscript with Lisa Muchangi
Baraza Media Lab’s former marketing and communications manager on building in communities in the African media industry.
“It has always just been me doing experiments my whole life, which is visible now in my adult life. Even my own career has been a big experiment.”
Lisa Muchangi is the kind of person who genuinely believes that the results of a well-designed experiment are always more useful than the comfort of sticking with what already exists. She has believed this since she was a teenager, teaching herself in the National Library in Nairobi’s Upper Hill while everyone else was in school.
A marketing, communications, and community strategist based in Nairobi, she was, until recently, the Marketing and Communications Manager at Baraza Media Lab, a role she held for five years, during which she organised four editions of the Africa Media Festival, one of the largest gatherings of media professionals on the continent.
Born and raised in Nairobi, Muchangi refused from a young age to accept instructions without understanding the reasoning behind them. “I wasn’t the type of child you would tell do this because I said so,” she says. “I would always be like, ‘Reason with me. Why? Make it make sense to me.’” Her parents — a former teacher and a banker — fed this instinct. They encouraged their children to be confident and seize opportunities. “My dad made me believe that I could literally be an astronaut if I wanted.”
In the first term of her second year of high school, Muchangi decided that she didn’t want to continue with the Kenyan curriculum. She was particularly bored, sitting through lessons on “the advantages of colonialism,” as she puts it. She proposed to her parents that she educate herself instead.
“My parents made me do a PowerPoint presentation to explain my plan,” she recalls. The pitch was that she would teach herself the British curriculum independently, sit the international exams, and, if the experiment failed, re-enter the traditional school system. “I told them, look, let’s do a six-month experiment. So at least they don’t feel the pressure of making a permanent decision.”
Her parents agreed. And every morning, when other children were heading to school, Muchangi’s parents dropped her off at the National Library in Nairobi’s Upper Hill area, where she spent entire days teaching herself. She did this for eight months, two beyond the original proposal, though her parents never pulled the plug. Her father and mother would check in on her between meetings to confirm that their daughter was actually doing what she said she was doing. She was. She sat her mock exams, did well, sat her final exams, did well, and walked away from the whole experiment with her high school certificate a few months shy of her sixteenth birthday.
That then became the crux of another problem. Muchangi had finished high school far too early to enter university. Her parents held this particular line. “I would have been swallowed by the university world at that age,” she concedes now. But for someone as industrious as she was, idle time was never really an option. She needed something to do, and managing events turned out to be the most obvious door.
She started small, with birthday parties, curated dinners, and milestone gatherings. The first real paying event was a Dora the Explorer-themed birthday party for a five-year-old. She got the gig via a referral from someone she knew — she had originally done a similar job for free, and word got around. She treated the paid job with the same seriousness. “I’m very big about protecting your name,” she says. “Whatever I touch, I make it beautiful.” From there, her reputation grew steadily, one client recommending her to the next, and the scope of each job kept getting slightly larger than the last.
It did not take long for her to turn her attention to weddings. The appeal was precisely the high stakes, because it demanded a level of rigour and contingency planning that pushed her to become better, faster. “People are very sensitive about weddings because everybody gets married with the hope that they’ll only get married once,” she explains. “It’s not like a birthday where maybe next year things will go better. You have a chance to make or break this person’s biggest day.”
She started with Nairobi-based weddings, then graduated to destination events: coastal venues, remote bush settings in Maasai Mara, locations that stripped away the familiar infrastructure and required her to run everything herself. Her first wedding was between an Italian woman and a Kenyan man, a cross-cultural event that she had convinced both families to trust her with.
By the time she turned eighteen, Muchangi was ready to take what she had learned organising social events and apply it somewhere new. She had been deliberately putting herself in rooms she didn’t technically need to be in — networking events and startup gatherings in Nairobi’s Silicon Savannah era — absorbing perspectives and watching how professional communities were convened. “I used to go to these networking events. I didn’t even care what event it was. I didn’t care whether it was about fintech or what. It didn’t matter. I was like, I’m here, I just want to be in these spaces.” The observation sharpened something in her thinking: she wanted to do more than social events. She wanted to design the kind of gatherings that built professional ecosystems.
Her first full-time job came at nineteen, at Ikigai Nairobi, a wellness-focused collective of co-working spaces. She was also in university at the time, juggling both. The role at Ikigai sat at the intersection of marketing and community building — exactly the territory she had been circling for years. There, she deepened her understanding of what it meant to grow a community not through advertising, but through care: making people feel so at home in a space that they couldn’t help but bring others in. “I’ve always been like, how do we get people to be so happy about these spaces that when we open a new one, and they tell their friends, you should join this community, without us having to do so much heavy lifting of convincing people to come on board,” she reflects.
It was her work at Ikigai that caught the attention of Baraza Media Lab. She did not apply. The role was created with her in mind, and she was approached directly. What drew her to say yes was the nature of the organisation itself. Baraza had been born out of research into the state of media in Kenya, and one of its founding premises was that the media ecosystem needed space for experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaboration, that podcasters, filmmakers, and journalists were operating in silos, and that bringing them together in a physical, intentional community could change that. “I love that it was first of its kind,” Muchangi says. “And that it was highly experimental. It was an experiment with some initial funding that was like, okay, go forth and see what you’re going to make out of it.”
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She joined in the middle of COVID, which meant the job immediately required her to figure out how to keep a physical community alive during a period of forced distance. She grew the newsletter, hosted webinars, ran hybrid events, and organised a vaccination drive to bring media and creative workers in the area through the space. When in-person events became possible again, she had already developed a clear playbook for the transition. As the organisation grew, so did her role, which evolved from events to a full marketing and communications brief covering Baraza’s expansion into new counties across Kenya — Kisumu, Nakuru, and Mombasa, each requiring its own audience strategy built around the specific context and needs of that market.
The centrepiece of her time at Baraza was the Africa Media Festival, which she managed end-to-end across all four editions. The festival was born out of a collective frustration with the traditional conference format — the same panels, the same faces, the same regurgitation of ideas. “We got a bit very tired of conferences in the traditional format,” she says. “And Baraza is an experimental space by nature, so we must create space for experimentation and for novel ideas.”
The first edition was held at a hotel. The feedback from the community was immediate and clear: this feels like every other conference. By the second edition, they had moved to the outdoor grounds of the National Museums of Kenya, and the shift in atmosphere changed everything. “Something as small as venue, it may seem small, but it really does open up people. You feel like you can think.” The festival grew into a genuinely pan-African gathering built on formats designed to be useful: short ignite talks of eight to ten minutes, audience-led conversations, and hands-on workshops that attendees could take back and apply the following week.
The metric Muchangi cared most about was not attendance but the ratio of new to returning visitors, which held steady at fifty-fifty — meaning that half the people who came each year brought someone new with them. “It’s a fiercely strong community on its own,” she says. “People actually look forward to coming to this event.”
After five years at Baraza, Muchangi’s chapter there has come to a close. She will announce her next move in a few months. What she will say now is that it will take her skills from an East African stage to a pan-African one — deeper into audience strategy and what she calls evangelical community growth. Her central argument, the one she has been making in one form or another since she was planning birthday parties at fifteen, is simple: the product should always follow the audience, never the other way around. “Niche does not mean small,” she says, borrowing a line she heard at the festival that stuck with her. “It means specific.” That, in the end, is what all her experiments have been trying to prove.
Very very nice. Library(home?)-schooled by choice. Brave parents are very hard to find. Well done Lisa, well done.