She has served in many different health organisations, at home and abroad, and was the first African president of the International Council of Nurses (ICN).
After secondary education at Loreto High School in Limuru she went to the UK to train at Southampton General Hospital from 1959–1962.
Once she had qualified as a nurse she went to the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion in Edinburgh for midwifery training, completing it in 1964.
[2] From 1967 she played a key role in establishing the National Nurses Association of Kenya, an organisation given legal status in 1968.
[10] In the early 1990s she was a member of the Global Advisory Council on AIDS,[11] and was involved in various ways with the World Health Organization (WHO), partly as chairman of the Regional Nursing Task Force based in Nairobi.