Susan Wood, who has died at her home outside Nairobi aged 87, spent most of her life in east Africa, and did much in support of women. In 1975, with two Kenyan women, she founded Kazuri (Swahili for small and beautiful), a bead factory, at the bottom of her garden in Karen, outside Nairobi. Today it employs 200 women, mostly single mothers, and exports to six countries. In 1990 she was an awarded an MBE.
In the early 1950s, Sue and her husband Michael (later Sir Michael) Wood, had joined David Stirling in setting up the Capricorn Africa Society in the belief that all the races in east and central Africa should work together to create a society free from discrimination. She was a moving spirit in the 1956 Salima conference, when more than 200 men and women - black, white and brown - lived, argued, ate and drank together for three days, something that had never happened in Africa before.
That year Sue stood for the Kenya parliament on Capricorn principles in a Europeans-only constituency. Her red hair, bright blue eyes and incisive mind made her a good candidate, but the voters were not ready to give up their privileges and she lost. The demand for independence across sub-Saharan Africa overcame that innocent enthusiasm and a few years later Capricorn closed in Africa, though it continued in London, as the Zebra Trust, caring for mainly African students.
Sue was born in a mud hut in the Congo jungle to missionary parents; and, at the age of two, carried in a hammock to the Nile when her family returned to England, where she spent her childhood. She met Michael while training as a wartime nurse; they married in 1943 and later moved to Kenya.
In Nairobi, she raised four children and supported her husband's medical work, which included founding the Flying Doctors, later to become the African Medical Research Foundation (AMREF). In 1960, she wrote Kenya: the Tensions of Progress, an analysis of the pre-independence political situation. Four years later came an autobiography, A Fly in Amber; she also wrote some volumes of poetry, dedicated "To Africa, my home".
Sue and Michael moved to a farm on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, from which Michael flew to the AMREF headquarters in Nairobi and throughout east Africa while Sue enjoyed being a farmer. In 1975 the farm was taken over by the Tanzanian government, and the Woods, sadly but without complaint, moved to Karen. Michael died in 1987, but Sue continued to entertain her family and the many visitors connected with AMREF and FARMAfrica, the charity which Michael had started to help farmers improve their stock and production.
Sue's warmth, humour and generosity suffused her life. She always saw herself as an African and had a deep understanding of the struggles they faced. She said: "I love the people, and I love Africa because everything is unexpected, nothing goes quite straightforwardly." She is survived by four children, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
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