The joke rests on data. Across agriculture, hospitality, informal trade, and MSMEs, women are the dominant participants.
For years, corporate social responsibility in Kenya has carried a credibility problem. Many initiatives arrive loudly and exit quietly, leaving behind press releases rather than measurable change. Mendi Njonjo does not evade this critique. She names it directly.
“A lot of people think foundations are just the PR arm of a brand,” says Njonjo, Director of the KCB Foundation. “It’s a fair question.”
What she describes is reputational CSR: activity designed to polish image rather than alter outcomes. “If you interrogate the substance, it rarely tilts social impact or social justice in any meaningful way. It has its place. But if you look at institutions that are actually shifting conditions, corporate foundations have to move beyond reputation and into impact.”
For Njonjo, that shift is not semantic. It is structural. “The work has to be grounded in corporate citizenship. In our case, the organising idea is shared prosperity. If you are deploying capital, time, and institutional power, it should result in durable change.”
This framing underpins her attempt to reorient how corporate Kenya engages development. Shared prosperity is not treated as aspiration, but as design logic.
After more than two decades working across gender, youth employment, climate, and finance, her focus is clear: building systems that make finance usable, legible, and consequential for African women, while creating pathways to jobs, income security, and dignity.
A calling shaped by service
Njonjo’s orientation toward public purpose was shaped early. “I always knew I wanted to work with people,” she says. The specifics changed over time, but service remained constant.
Her parents modelled it. Her father’s work with the Kenya Red Cross and her mother’s deep community involvement normalised service as obligation rather than exception. Though she trained in mathematics and geography, humanitarian work ultimately prevailed.
“By the end of university, I was certain I wanted to work in the humanitarian or development space. Looking at Kenya and the region, I felt called to do something that addressed real conditions.”
That calling now translates into a simple operational question: what actually shifts fortunes?
“At KCB Foundation, we asked ourselves how you create shared prosperity for the communities the Group banks or engages. The answer is education and employment. Those two determine whether people can access opportunity or are locked out of full citizenship.”
Women and the productive economy
Njonjo speaks about women’s economic role with both precision and impatience. “I joke that Kenyan women must have chronic backache from carrying the economy,” she says. The joke rests on data. Across agriculture, hospitality, informal trade, and MSMEs, women are the dominant participants. They are also the largest cohort starting nano and micro enterprises. Yet they face layered constraints.
Access to collateral remains a central barrier. “Advancing a business requires assets. Land. Property. And this is where socio cultural norms stop being ‘soft’ and start being structural.”
Time poverty compounds the problem. “The idea that everyone has the same 24 hours is false. A woman’s time is not equivalent to her brother’s or her partner’s, especially when care work is unequally distributed. Time poverty directly limits women’s participation in the productive economy.”
These constraints aggregate into the gender finance gap. “The capital shortfall for women owned businesses is in the hundreds of billions across Africa. If that capital moved, GDP gains of up to 30 percent are plausible.”
The paradox is well established. “Women repay. The data is unequivocal. Lending to women owned enterprises carries lower default risk.”
2Jiajiri and systems design
These insights converge in 2Jiajiri, the KCB Foundation’s flagship programme.
Each year, roughly one million young people enter Kenya’s labour market. Only a fraction find formal employment. 2Jiajiri addresses this mismatch through two linked pathways.
The workforce development arm focuses on readiness. “We work to ensure young people can be employed, self employed, or become employers.”
The enterprise arm strengthens MSMEs. “Early business failure is usually about weak systems. We work to make enterprises investor ready, credit worthy, and resilient.”
Scholarships anchor the workforce strategy. The Foundation supports roughly 15,000 learners annually, making it one of the largest TVET scholarship programmes in the country.
Placement outcomes are actively tracked through partnerships with training institutions and counties. Financial literacy is embedded throughout. “Basic financial management is not intuitive. Separating household and business finances, managing shocks, keeping records. These are survival skills.”
Women entrepreneurs are supported through the KCB Biashara Club, which provides peer learning, coaching, and mentorship.
“The objective is straightforward,” Njonjo says. “Decent jobs. Decent incomes. A labour market people can actually participate in.”
Livelihoods, climate, and justice
Beyond enterprise and employment, the Foundation runs Mifugo ni Mali, a livestock programme spanning species from bees to cattle. It focuses on productivity, value addition, financial literacy, and market access, particularly in arid and semi arid regions.
Climate justice cuts across this work. “There is no plan B,” Njonjo says. “This is the only planet we have.”
She points to the employment potential of the green transition, including Kenya’s tree growing agenda, but stresses unequal impact. “Those least responsible for climate change bear the heaviest burden. When water is scarce, it is women who walk further to fetch it.”
Excluding women and youth from climate solutions leads to shallow outcomes. “You end up with interventions that look good but do not address root causes.”
Scale, ambition, and legacy
Asked what she is proudest of, Njonjo does not cite outputs. “I’m proud of the ambition. Of our refusal to be incremental.”
She values partners who share that posture. “The best partners do not want small outcomes for Kenyan people.”
Legacy, for her, is not personal. “It is about building systems that outlast you. Creating space for others to step in. Changing conditions so people can exercise full citizenship.”
If lives are measurably different before and after an intervention, that is sufficient. “That is legacy. Raha tupate na ustawi.”
