Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO)

Kennedy is one of Africa’s best-known community organizers and social entrepreneurs. Kennedy grew up in Kenya's Kibera slum, the largest slum in Africa. As a teenager, he saved 20 cents to buy a soccer ball and start Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO).

Today, SHOFCO impacts over 359,000 slum dwellers across 14 urban slums in Kenya, and is the largest employer in Kibera. In 2018, SHOFCO received the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, the world's largest humanitarian prize awarded to nonprofits that have made extraordinary contributions to alleviate human suffering.

Although he was entirely informally educated, Kennedy received a full scholarship to Wesleyan University, graduating in 2012 as the Commencement Speaker and with honors. Kennedy is a New York Times best-selling author and has published opinion articles in The New York Times, CNN, and The Guardian. Kennedy is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a UBS Global Visionary.

With a rapidly growing and tragically underserved urban slum population of 7.5M people, Kenya faces one of the most challenging slum situations in the world. Despite advancements and economic growth, poverty still affects millions of Kenyans in urban slums. This urban slum population is large, growing, and underserved. 

SHOFCO is a grassroots organization that aims to create a nationwide movement for slum transformation hand-in-hand with urban slum dwellers across Kenya -- providing them an opportunity to lead their own development and elevate those who have been left out of the many advancements in society.

Through this community-led model, we’ll reach 5M individuals annually through access to resources and scale our blueprint for empowerment, providing communities with tools to improve outcomes themselves. By sharing this replicable model with other grassroots-leaders seeking similar systemic change, SHOFCO seeks to spark slum transformation in other countries -- elevating the urban poor around the globe.

About 7.5 million people—56 percent of Kenya’s total urban population—live in slums without adequate critical services like affordable healthcare or clean water, and without sufficient access to opportunities through jobs or education to improve their lives.

Nairobi’s population is 4.4m people and 2.5m living in urban slums with extremely crowded conditions. The residents of these communities are low-income, and have very little disposable income to invest in essential supplies, especially in a time of economic downturn. With a Gini Index of 0.59 - if Nairobi were a country, it would rank as the 2nd most unequal in the world. The lack of effective action would most like lead to worsening inequality. 

Multiple efforts have been made to address extreme poverty and inequality but they tend to miss the mark. Conventional approaches to address these challenges rely on top-down delivered solutions. These solutions are rarely developed with the input of communities, who are not empowered to assert their real needs. The government lacks knowledge and political will to intervene, and interventions by groups outside these communities often fail to address these inequities. With inequality high and rising, slum transformation driven by slum dwellers is urgently needed.

SHOFCO knows that  the cause of extreme poverty is not a singular issue, but rather a complex web of systems and barriers that manifests differently between communities. We provide a community-led approach to urban slum communities in Kenya. Our innovative model starts with strategic recognition that systemic denial of services is one of the most powerful forms of marginalization and from there, employs a two-pronged approach - community engagement and access to basic services. 

Through a holistic network of services including healthcare and economic development - SHOFCO addresses immediate needs and demonstrates what is achievable in the slums, building credibility for community-driven change. Access to services allows individuals to get off survival mode and focus on their long-term development. Community engagement facilitates large-scale grassroots advocacy efforts that enables individuals to organize themselves to actively seek tangible change in their community and society at large.

In isolation, service provision and community engagement have been attempted before but usually leads to a top-down cycle. The innovation behind this holistic and integrated approach enables greater access to basic services, as providers better understand community needs and are spurred to do more to meet needs - leading to unprecedented reductions in inequality and poverty.

SHOFCO serves Kenya’s urban slums in the counties of Nairobi, Kisumu, Kilifi, and Mombasa. We currently work in the Kibera, Mathare, Mukuru Kwa Njenga, Kawangware, Korogocho, and Central Business District areas of Nairobi, Bangladesh, Maweni, Mshomoroni and Likoni slums in Mombasa, Nyalenda and Obunga slums in Kisumu, and Majenga and Mzambarauni slums in Kalifi.

Residents of these communities experience poor infrastructure and dense living quarters, and are deprived of basic services. Those living in these communities are deeply vulnerable, and daily challenges include limited access to employment, education, healthcare, sanitation and clean water; inadequate and insecure housing, violent and unhealthy environments, and few if any social protection mechanisms. 

SHOFCO is a community-led organization committed to incorporating the voice and perspective of the community, starting from within. 99% of our staff are Kenyan and and over 70% have direct relationships with our communities either because they are from one of the slums themselves or they have family living there and benefitting from our services.  

Today, SHOFCO is the only organization of its kind that works with urban slum communities in Kenya, due to the extent of the services we provide directly and our focus on cross-sector partnerships.

With the lack of infrastructure, poor living conditions, the lack of access to basic services such as water and healthcare, and limited opportunities for work and income -- urban slum residents have been traditionally left out of the advancements that benefits those outside the slums. SHOFCO, with its innovated model of service delivery combined with community engagement, is allowing allowing marginalized slum dwellers to break out of survival mode while providing opportunities for them to transform their families and their own communities. 

In 2004, I started SHOFCO as a teenager with passion, 20 cents, and a soccer ball. I grew up in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum, where I experienced the devastating realities of life in extreme poverty. I dreamt of becoming the “Martin Luther King Jr. of Kibera” and inspiring a movement to advance the rights and dreams of slum dwellers. In an iron sheet shack, I started SHOFCO by organizing my fellow youth, with the belief that the key to prosperity is empowering communities to participate actively in our own transformation and harnessing our collective voice to advocate for change. 

In 2007, I met Jessica Posner, an American student studying abroad in Nairobi. Together, our first major investment was to build and open a free school for girls, under the premise of creating the next generation of leaders. We also recognized the importance of addressing the underlying drivers of poverty in the community and began offering services that address basic needs in the community, including access to healthcare, economic empowerment, and clean water and sanitation. Thus in 2009, SHOFCO was incorporated and its model was formed with three fundamental pillars: access to services, girls’ education, and grassroots community engagement.

Growing up in Kibera, Africa’s largest urban slum, I learned that human-life was not valued equally. Violence and loss were constant themes throughout my life, but I was inspired by the palpable hope that persisted within the slum and understood that people, just like me, are at the root of social progress. 

My dreams to change my community grew from my own personal experiences with poverty and crime. The first time I ever had extra money -- 20 cents in 2004 -- I bought a soccer ball and started Shining Hope for Communities, one of the first youth groups in Kibera founded and run by slum residents. With no funding, but with faith in people's abilities to change their own lives, I expanded this group, working with thousands of people on AIDS-education, female empowerment, microfinance, sanitation, and community health work.

I organized young people to work together in an organization that has grown beyond my wildest dreams. Yet, as I look at the larger structural problems of poverty in my country, I feel my work has just begun and I will continue to spread SHOFCO’s model as far and wide as I can with the help of Kenya's resilient people.

SHOFCO brings more than ten years of experience implementing grassroots, community-led change efforts in the slums of Kenya. Today, SHOFCO is the only organization of its kind that works with urban slum communities in Kenya, due to the extent of services we provide directly and our focus on cross-sector partnerships. Expanding across diverse slums has fine-tuned an approach that is adaptable and resilient, and we continuously document and apply learning to improve our innovations. As the largest Kenyan NGO working in the slums, we are committed to accurately representing our work and the community.

At the staff level, 99% of our staff are Kenyan and 70% have direct ties to the slums where we work.  At the leadership level, SHOFCO maintains two Boards: a Kenyan Advisory Board made up of 99% Kenyan members with 10% from the slum community and a Global Board of Directors that is 10% Kenyan. To ensure the Kenyan voice continues to be present at the Global Board level, two members of the Kenyan Advisory Board serve on the Global Board to connect the two perspectives.

SHOFCO was recognized in 2018 for its world-class approach to grassroots development by becoming the youngest-ever recipient of the Hilton Humanitarian Prize, the world’s largest NGO humanitarian award. In 2018, I was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. As a result of passion and commitment, SHOFCO is among a small handful of grassroots, community-led development organizations that have received these recognitions.

The current COVID-19 crisis demonstrates the importance of community-based interventions in urban slums. In times of peace and crisis, SHOFCO has always leveraged its 2-pronged solution - community engagement and service provision -  to address the inequities raised by the communities we serve. This is the same model that has allowed us to sharply pivot from our existing programs - girls’ education, healthcare, etc. - to disaster prevention and response.

In just four months, SHOFCO has successfully launched response efforts across 14 urban slums. To date, we have mobilized over 1,800 Community Health Volunteers who have screened over 1,094,929 people for symptoms. We have installed over 303 hand washing and sanitation stations. SHOFCO has provided over 19 million liters of clean water for free through our innovative aerial piping system and through water truck access points. In the last 4 months we directly impacted more individuals than we ever have before with 1 million beneficiaries and counting.

This quick and massive mobilization has garnered the attention of the Ministry of Health, the private sector, and the international press. We were recently invited to join the Government’s National COVID-19 Task Force, because of this proven and deep-rooted community mechanism.

At ten-years-old, I was the secretary for my mom’s women’s group in our home, the Kibera Slum. The women began to save, and soon economic freedom empowered them to speak out against the regular violence they experienced. Eventually, neighbors would intervene. My mom suffered beatings of her own. The women’s group was outlawed. But my mom wasn’t deterred, they continued to meet in secret. I remained secretary, although I was taking a risk to help this underground women’s movement, it was worth it. Leadership means standing up for what you know is right, even if your community isn’t ready. I saw this in my mom. 

Later, I started the first free school for girls. The friends I grew up with resisted. At best, they made fun of me. At worst, I received threats against my life. I persisted, because I knew that changing the value of girls in my community was right, no matter how difficult or even dangerous.  Ultimately, I found a way to bring the men in my community along by connecting a girls school to other needed services from which they benefit: making a girls school a portal of community change. 

SHOFCO’s innovation is unparalleled in its focus on local leadership and partnership-building to effect sustainable change. We are the only organization of its kind that works with urban slum communities in Kenya. Our work begins at the grassroots and we build sustainable cross-sector partnerships between marginalized slum communities, and critical services with the potential to lift communities out of poverty. We empower communities to connect with existing services and demand services that should be provided, but are not. Most existing service providers are working in individual slums, in one service area. We span multiple slums and sectors and seek to build a nation-wide network across Kenya. 

Our agenda is to provide –directly or in partnership –services that communities identify as most important, and to galvanize communities to advocate for their civic rights. As such, everything we do originates in the community. We unite disparate networks of slum-dwellers around a shared vision, effectively creating a unified platform from which to mobilize for sustainable change.

The innovation behind SHOFCO’s work has been internationally recognized. In 2018, we were recognized for our world-class approach to grassroots development by becoming the youngest-ever recipient of the Hilton Humanitarian Prize, the world’s largest NGO humanitarian award.

SHOFCO seeks to demonstrate that community-led change results in more effective outcomes in reducing inequality for Kenya’s urban poor. By shifting from direct service-provision and focusing on community organizing with the power to secure partner-led service delivery, we believe SHOFCO’s SUN-led model has the greatest potential to achieve sustainable impact at scale.

SHOFCO’s transformation  model focuses  on  three  main  levers  of change:  breaking  survival  mode (through access to healthcare, clean water,  and economic empowerment),  community  organization  and  grassroots  advocacy,  and educating the female leaders of tomorrow. Through these three levers, two forms of leadership are actualized: slum dwellers organize and effectively demand for change, and new leadership disrupts the status quo, hearing these demands and implementing solutions. In this way individuals are enabled to participate in and drive long-term change in their communities, through both connection to life-saving services and capacity building tools to improve their living standards and effectively advocate for their rights.

Evidence suggests that meaningful community engagement and tangible, on-the-ground improvements are required to make progress. SHOFCO has a track record of achieving both through  SHOFCO Urban Network (SUN) community organizing platform: SUN provides ongoing social and economic benefit to  members through the provision of community centers, micro-insurance, and savings groups, while also providing the organizing structure for collective action. SUN has already been proven to be scalable and replicable and is currently active across 14 diverse slums --    driven by community demand -- with a membership of 160,000 slum residents.

International organizations and/or governments will be unable to empower systemic change in the slums without being effectively woven into the fabric of the community. In addition, the Kenyan government has a lack of understanding of slum dynamics and no incentive to serve slum communities. SHOFCO has built trust with community stakeholders that is necessary to implement lasting change, and it’s people-power has already captured government attention and established traction in promoting the urban slum agenda. With each win for equitable service delivery, slum dwellers see the impact of their voice and become more incentivized to advocate for long-term change in their communities.

Over the past 10 years, SHOFCO has expanded from one site in Kibera to 14 sites across Kenya’s three largest cities of Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu. In 2019, SHOFCO directly impacted over 360,000 beneficiaries, a 30% increase over the prior year, through access to education, healthcare, economic empowerment, WASH, gender-based violence prevention, and community advocacy. 

Our current COVID-19 response efforts has allowed us to expand our services to 3 additional slums, growing our reach to a total of 14 urban slums across four counties. In just four months of our response efforts, we have impacted over 1 million slum residents and counting.

SHOFCO will scale SUN deeply and to more communities across the country, on the path to achieving scale and ultimately reaching 5 million urban slum residents nationwide by 2030.

Our highest ambition is to end extreme poverty and inequality by demonstrating a model for transformation that can be adapted throughout the world. To do this, we will build a national strategy for transforming Kenya’s urban slums so that all individuals have their basic needs met and have opportunities to improve the livelihoods of themselves, their families, and their communities.

SHOFCO impacted over 359,000 direct beneficiaries across 11 slums in Kenya in 2018. By 2030, our goal is to harness the power of the community by scaling our grassroots platform nationwide, reaching 5 million beneficiaries with dignified access to critical services - allowing them to drive their agenda and hold stakeholders to account in meeting their needs. This expansion will require heroic efforts by SHOFCO and our community engagement platform, to organically reach and establish ties with slum communities throughout Kenya’s major cities. In achieving our growth ambitions, we aim to demonstrate a model that inspires replication around the globe. 

This will be the foundation of a widespread movement to realise the dignity of Kenya’s urban poor and reduce inequality by achieving lasting improvements. Support and recognition from the Elevate Prize would have a tremendous impact in helping us realize this goal. 

1. Unstable Political Climate

2. Community Politics - tribal/ethnic conflicts

3. Limited Government Involvement

Unstable Political Climate: One major risk of working in urban slums is the potential for major disputes or political conflicts within the community that can cause disruptions in our plans or affect uptake of services, like we observed during the 2017 political elections. In response to unrest in the community, SHOFCO takes an active peacekeeping role, cooperating with Kibera’s elected community leaders and our base of existing community groups, to manage potential internal and external conflicts that arise among community members. 

Community Politics: Individuals and groups that take advantage of the socioeconomic plight within informal settlements at times feel threatened by SHOFCO's mission to instill a sense of empowerment amongst community members.  This inevitably reduces their power and has oftentimes resulted in various actions to hurt the reputation of SHOFCO.  To mitigate these incidences, a majority of our staff members are local residents of the communities we work within.  This allows us to better understand the internal politics surrounding various issues and implement solutions.  

Limited Government Involvement: With limited government interaction and involvement, it is a challenge to achieve natiowide scale of social services and the advancement of pro-poor governance and policies.  To encourage public-private partnerships we have been building the infrastructure and systems that can be easily supported by the government.  In addition, our continuous documentation of community data and impact is becoming increasingly attractive to multiple parties, as SHOFCO's deep knowledge and understanding of community needs and relations is unknown to the general public.

SHOFCO continues to catalyze partnership and meaningful involvement from government, social and private sector stakeholders to pave the way for large-scale and sustainable change. A critical partnership is with the Kenyan government, which has resources to assist the poor, yet lacks the knowhow to successfully deliver them. SHOFCO seeks to increase government involvement in service delivery and develop strong county and Parliament-level relationships to unlock resources like educational bursaries, loan funds, improvements to much needed infrastructure such as schools, and boost healthcare initiatives. Strengthening these relationships will remain key to laying a permanent foundation for future infrastructure development.

We currently work closely with the Ministries of Health, Education, and Gender to provide resources for slum dwellers as well as capacity building for SHOFCO staff working in public services. We have successfully leveraged government relationships into milestones like the donation of a mobile health clinic by the Office of the First Lady and accreditation of our health clinics by National Hospital Insurance Fund. Other key partnerships include Medecins sans frontieres, UN Aids, UN Habitat, UN Women, Amref (health), CAPYEI, Generations Kenya, Data Digital Divide, and Kenya PET Recycling Company for targeted skills training and income generation.

SHOFCO is a grassroots movement that aims to harness the voices and lived experiences of community members to determine what services SHOFCO provides to the community as we layer on direct services (girls’ education, economic empowerment programs, WASH, health clinics) to the SHOFCO Urban Network (SUN) platform that forms the basis of our work. By reaching adults, unemployed youth, and children of primary and secondary school age, SHOFCO seeks to unlock the potential of all individuals in the community to thrive and prosper.

Members of the target community are vocal about the challenges of living in urban slums where public services are virtually non-existent. Consumed with the daily difficulties of simply surviving, slum dwellers struggle to conceptualize alternative pathways for themselves and their families. Without an organizing mechanism and access to essential services, they remain marginalized and locked in survival mode.

SHOFCO demonstrates the first community-led model for slum transformation that is scalable, sustainable, and replicable. Most service providers in the slums only focus on one program area or one slum. SHOFCO delivers an integrated set of affordable and quality services and creates linkages between different service providers, thereby creating an ecosystem where individuals can thrive. SHOFCO’s model does not merely address the immediate symptoms of poverty, but enables individuals to participate in long-term change. What makes SHOFCO different, and the key to lasting success, is our meaningful engagement and shared ownership with the community. Through our services, we build the SUN organizing mechanism that facilitates large-scale grassroots advocacy.

SHOFCO pursues a multi-pronged approach to secure sustainable funding for the future. We explore various opportunities for earned revenue within our programs themselves. We have undertaken this approach within our water programs in both Kibera and Mathare and in our health clinics. SHOFCO provides water to Kibera residents at a rate 60 percent lower than the average rates charged by market rate vendors. This allows us to help to sustain our own water operations while still providing a low cost, high quality service to the residents of Kibera. We plan to further implement fair service charges for our programs in order to promote sustainability efforts in the future. 

SHOFCO works to increase and sustain multi-year grant agreements with various partners. These agreements demonstrate the successes that we have had and the trust that we have built through partnerships with major institutional funders over the past few years. Multi-year grant agreements give SHOFCO the flexibility to focus more closely on strategic planning and allows our funders to witness the impact of their contributions, as many projects can take extended periods of time to fully implement and report on. 

Lastly, SHOFCO aims to increase our African support base over the next few years. In addition to African representation in SHOFCO’s leadership, we are also seeking to increase our African support and funding. These funds are largely corporate funding that we are highly confident that we will secure.

SHOFCO’s fundraising program is run by an engaged Board of Directors and a lean fundraising team based in New York City and in Nairobi. Most of our funding comes from individual and institutional funders based in the United States, with the remainder coming from corporate sponsors in the United States and Kenya. In 2018, SHOFCO raised a total of $9.12 million, including $6.5 million from institutional funders (mostly foundations) and $2.36 million from individual donors including our board members, individual major donors, and our base of individual supporters giving $5k or less. On average 65% of our donations are restricted to specific program areas and activities. Our fundraising activities focus on cultivating and stewarding institutional and major individual donors by providing high-quality content and timely program updates, with substantive impact metrics.

From humble origins, SHOFCO has grown to operate across Kenya’s largest cities of Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu. In 2021, we will embark on our most ambitious growth plan to date, with the ultimate goal of reaching 20 slums across all major urban centers in Kenya. By 2030, we envision SHOFCO as a nationwide movement impacting 5 million slum residents across Kenya and leading urban slum transformation across Kenya. 

Being awarded would propel SHOFCO to the global stage alongside other organizations that alleviate human suffering in some of the world’s most challenging contexts. Being recognized with this honor would open doors for invaluable thought partnerships and sustained financial support. With opportunities afforded as a result of the recognition that the Prize provides, we would be able to further expand our programs by scale and scope, providing hope, dignity, and opportunity for Kenya’s urban slum dwellers and transforming the landscape and trajectory of extreme poverty worldwide.

Finally, it is projected that by 2045, the world’s urban population will reach six billion leaving emerging economies like Kenya, to endure this rapid growth without the capacity to handle these challenges - letting urban poverty explode. Being honored with this Prize will recognize that there has to be a global focus to the issue of urban poverty. It will also recognize that the way to address extreme poverty is not by parachuting into these communities but to engage those who are impacted and building a model for service delivery and leadership, from the inside out.