Azah Ningo

she/her/hers

As the Program Coordinator, Azah oversees communications, student employees, general programming, and occasional pop-up visits from students. Azah brings 10 years of experience working with high school exchange students, including participation in the U.S. Department of State’s public diplomacy program. She was third-in-command at a small nonprofit exchange organization for 7 years, helping grow it from 25 summer students to 125 academic-year students across the United States, plus 50 summer students.

Azah’s father was a Cameroonian international student who arrived in the U.S. in 1969. During his 18 years in the States, he earned his Ph.D., married an American woman, and had an adorable little girl. Azah was born in Upstate New York and moved to Cameroon, West Africa, with her parents at age 6. She lived there until high school. In college (Duke University, Class of 2002, go Blue Devils!), many of Azah’s friends were international students, and she watched several of them struggle to acclimate. Her friends enriched her life in immeasurable ways, and she is thrilled to pay it forward by helping the next generation of international students. She obtained her bachelor’s with a major in Psychology, a minor in French, and a certificate in Education. Azah specializes in mid- and late-adolescent development, women’s advocacy, and cross-cultural communication. Her hope for the future is to leverage her experience to develop integration programming—enhancing connections between Duke’s international and domestic populations and creating links between the university’s international population and Durham-at-large. In her spare time, Azah enjoys watching international TV series and movies, reading, doing math and crossword puzzles, listening to world music, walking extremely slowly, telling jokes only she appreciates, and spending time with her friends’ Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha children, learning and butchering new slang.