Shelmith (Shel) Kariuki
Jaya Karbon Kounsel was founded by Shelmith Kariuki. Shelmith is an incoming PhD in Climate Change and Adaptation student at the University of Nairobi. She holds a BSc in Actuarial Science, an MSc in Applied Statistics, both from JKUAT, and an MSc in Economics from UCD, Ireland, with a focus on climate change, sustainability, and ESG.
She is also the founder of fhionQ. fhionQ is a climate, sustainability, and ESG advisory firm, helping African governments, companies, and academic and research institutions understand climate change and act on it, through training, advisory, technology, and hands-on implementation.
Shelmith began her career in academia, first as a statistical programming tutor, then as an independent lecturer teaching actuarial science, statistics and programming units. She later moved away from academia to work as a data analyst in the private sector.
Her first employer in the private sector was a behavioural economics research organisation, where she was introduced to behavioural economics and its role in understanding the choices that people make. There, she gained extensive experience in data management and analytics, automating data workflows, working with databases, predictive modeling and machine learning, developing dashboards, conducting desk research, writing analytical reports, preparing client presentation decks, and telling stories with data.
At the end of 2019, she left the firm to take a career break. During this time, she took the RStudio (now Posit) Tidyverse Instructor Certification course to learn how to become an excellent data programming trainer, started Amandla, an initiative to train young ladies in data analytics, and advocated for the use of R and Python for data analytics by conducting trainings and leading an Africa-based data science community. She also worked on various short-term behavior change projects for various clients and the rKenyaCensus project, which involved scraping census data from pdf files and converting it into a machine readable format.
At the end of 2020, Shelmith joined the population division of UN DESA. Her role was to process and standardise population data from all UN member states. This work led to the creation of the {rddharmony} R package and was published in the World Population Prospects 2022 report. She later joined the World Bank as a data analytics consultant.
Over a six-year period, she worked on a wide variety of datasets across different fields and gained a wealth of data analytics and web app development skills. She also presented her work and trained at various global data conferences, including useR! 2019 in Toulouse, France, the virtual rstudio::global(2021), and rstudio::conf(2022) in Washington, D.C.
At the end of 2022, Shelmith set out to specialize in a field where she could put her data analytics and research skills to work on problems with real social impact. In September 2023, she moved to Ireland to pursue her second postgraduate course, an MSc in Economics. It wasn’t until she sat in the Energy Economics and Policy class and later secured an internship with an environmental economics firm that she became certain about her next career path. At the end of that internship, she was excited to dive deeper into this space. She therefore embarked on a beautiful journey of self-study, exploring the energy sector and climate change from the basic concepts, while developing a broader understanding of these issues from a global perspective. During this period, she pursued various certification courses, including the CSRD Institute’s CSRD and VSME courses and CFI’s ESG Specialization course.
At the end of 2025, she felt compelled to return home to Kenya to lend her voice to climate adaptation and mitigation in Africa. She founded Jaya Karbon Kounsel to advance climate action and sustainability across the continent by supporting communities to build resilience against climate change and create sustainable livelihoods in the process.