Karibu! Welcome. You’ve just stepped into another world – a world where the West meets Africa as equal partners. A world where solutions to poverty are real, and are sustainable – and are happening. A world that maybe you’ve been looking for for a long while.
ZanaAfrica (ZanaA) is a non-profit-making, non-governmental organization which began in October 2007. “Zana” in Kiswahili means “tools or weapons” and “Sanaa” is “a work of art or craftsmanship” – ZanaA is about crafting tools of ideas into weapons against poverty, to sustainably and replicably find simple solutions to complex problems.
Our mission is two-fold:
1) To identify and scale-up African-led enterprise solutions to sustainably address root issues of poverty. Our focus in the nexus of health, education, environment and gender with a key emphasis on technology.
2) To raise global awareness about the achievements within Africa in the past and present to provide a more balanced perspective on the continent
ZanaA has two major programs:
1) Sanitary pads: Keeping adolescent Kenyan girls in school by working with local innovators to develop environmentally friendly, locally-made sanitary pads, coordinating their free distribution, and creating a large-scale online monitoring mechanism to measure impact over time
2) Empowerment and EmpowerNet Clubs: Using mentorship to help primary and secondary students make informed decisions regarding their sexuality/life choices, which includes a Microfinance-for-University program helping youth get into and through university.
ZanaA seeks to incubate leading Kenyan innovators and ideas, and as such is supporting REFUGE (Restoring Forests for Future Generation) in its vital work in the Mau Forest, Kenyans most vital water catchment area that is under imminent threat of destruction.
