Erica Mann (1917 – 2007) was an architect and town planner who lived and worked in Kenya for almost all her adult life, after fleeing her home in Romania during the Second World War.

She was born Erika Schoenbaum in Vienna in 1917 and grew up in Romania where she went to school in Bucharest before studying architecture at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris.

In late 1940 the Manns, who were both secular Jews,[2] escaped across the Danube to safety, travelling east and south via Palestine and Egypt before spending some months in a British-run refugee camp in Northern Rhodesia.

[3] She and her husband became known for hosting "open house" afternoons where they welcomed guests of all ethnicities: colleagues, artists, politicians and other people from the "intelligentsia".

[2] She saw urban planning as "an ideal profession for a woman because it builds on her innate capacity for providing an orderly and aesthetic environment for herself, her family and the community in which she lives".

In 1972 she founded the Council for Human Ecology: Kenya, also known as CHEK, concerned with empowering rural women as well as environmental protection.

After retiring from government employment in 1984 some of Mann's creativity went into her unique collection of succulent plants from different parts of the African continent, arranged in an artistic and carefully designed garden.

Writing shortly after Mann's death, Betty Caplan, in an obituary titled "A Woman of Substance", described her as "Town planner, architect, ecologist, project manager, conservationist, bee keeper, speaker of seven languages, avid promoter of women's equality, jeweller, potter, craftswoman, gardener, collector.