Insights from a partner visit: Egmont Trust, Kenya

Treebeard has supported Egmont Trust since 2013. Egmont Trust identifies inspirational grassroots organisations across Sub-Saharan Africa that are able to deliver tangible results in improving the lives of children affected by HIV & AIDS, and channels 100% of the funding it raises in the UK and US into these locally led organisations. Treebeard's Founder and Chair, Barnaby Wiener, recently visited a number of Egmont Trust's partners in Kenya and shared the below insights for Egmont's April 2025 issue of its Grassroots newsletter.

I spent a week with Nomuhle Gola, Head of Programmes, and Charlotte Wells, Programme Support Officer, visiting four Egmont Partners:

• Community Fight Against GBV and HIV/AIDS (CFAGHS)

• Ace Africa

• The Nasio Trust

• Girl Child Counselling Women Group (GCCWG)

We visited Nairobi, Kisumu, Siaya, Butere and Eldoret, taking six flights in eight days, plus lots of driving. Doing due diligence on local grass roots projects is hard but it is also essential. It is impossible to grasp the essence of these projects without visiting them.

I won’t go into detail on each project we visited; it would take too long to write (and to read). They all have multiple strands to their work. They’re all run by inspiring leaders, rooted in the local community. All support extremely vulnerable people in places where there is no social safety net. And they are tackling problems which are truly systemic.

Community Fight’s Egmont-supported project focuses on addressing poverty, gender-based violence, transactional sex and unfair gender norms that impact the lives of many women and girls in Kisumu. I shan’t forget the sight of the girls’ dormitory at Community Fight’s premises: a safe house for girls affected by sexual violence. These girls often arrive before they are teenagers. I learned that often the instinct of the girls’ mothers is to protect their menfolk, not their daughters. Culturally, there is a lot of heavy lifting to be done.

Of course, the heavy lifting needs to be done within the local community, not imposed from on high. Solutions should be rooted in understanding the perspective and needs of the local community. Egmont’s mantra is “Local Solutions, Local Leaders”; on the back of this trip, I can vouch that they live and breathe it.

Shifting cultural norms is hard. It starts with education and it was an important strand of all the projects we visited. Often it was delivered via peer educators – those from the community impacted and trained to share information in their neighbourhoods, schools and friendship groups. The Nasio Trust in Mumias West has partnered with local schools to develop Health Clubs where young people are trained to become trainers themselves, teaching their peers about safe sex, HIV transmission, teenage pregnancy and consent.

GCCWG in Matunda also uses local people as counsellors to reach out to others. These are women living with HIV successfully – consistently adhering to their treatment and leading healthy, normal lives. They are trained to identify, counsel and support other women in their community who are HIV+ but are not taking their anti-retroviral (ARV) medication. There is still such stigma around HIV that many either refuse to be tested or refuse to adhere to treatment, even when they know they are positive.

The situation for people living with HIV is likely to get considerably worse with the planned cuts to USAID and in particular PEPFAR, which funds the distribution of ARVs across the continent. Needless to say, there was widespread concern about this in the communities we visited. Already, supplies were being rationed. Typically, patients would receive three months’ supply at a time; now it’s more like 2 - 4 weeks. Given many travel a long way to collect the drugs (because they don’t want to risk being seen at the clinic in their local community), this presents a major challenge. And if the funding is removed altogether, with nothing put in its place, it’s hard to see how the impact will be anything other than catastrophic.

The importance of self-sufficiency was a common thread of all the projects we visited. Poverty is at the root of so many problems, and building sustainable incomes is critical for people to tackle them. Alongside training Peer Educators, The Nasio Trust has established Young Farmers Clubs to promote more productive agriculture techniques (as well as better nutrition) among adolescents. GCCWG teaches young people vocational skills, such as cooking, hairdressing and beadwork; and it’s in the process of setting up a social enterprise bakery. Ace Africa also provides entrepreneurship training and supports women in setting up savings & loan groups.

I came away from the week feeling inspired by all the projects we visited. I was struck by the blend of compassion and practical resourcefulness embodied by the people we met. I was also struck by the sense that they are only scraping the surface. Creating systemic change through government-level initiatives and formal channels is costly when many of the critical institutions are lacking. While it’s the nature of grassroots projects that they’re discrete and targeted, rather than creating impact at vast scale, they do make a real impact on one life, one family, one community at a time.

Who knows, some of the young people we met may be the leaders of tomorrow. I watched twelve-year-old Bradley leading a Nasio Trust health club explaining confidently to his peers about the importance of consent in sexual relationships. Later I asked him about his future plans. “I want to go to secondary school in Nairobi”, he told me. “And after that I shall train as a lawyer”.

I’m not betting against him.

Barnaby Wiener, April 2025