Equipped with the teachings of Acumen’s East Africa Fellows Program, Caren Wakoli is building the next generation of ethical leaders in Kenya.
It’s 2011 and Caren Wakoli, 30 years old, stands tall at a wooden podium, addressing an audience of officials at the African Governance Forum. She delivers her remarks on the Kenyan youth perspective on Africa’s democracies in a serious, measured tone. Her hair is pulled back from her face, one unrippled by emotion, her intensity concentrated in her gaze out to the audience.
With an inquisitiveness characteristic of a young person learning the levers of the world, she poses the questions many would prefer to avoid: “Elections are supposed to affect everyone, to lift us up and give us hope and make us believe that all things are possible — is this what elections do for Africa?…What are we doing to leave a positive legacy for generations to come?…After 50 years of various African countries achieving their independence, what do we have to show?” and, quoting Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah: “Why has there not emerged in Africa since independence a new generation of leaders…committed to the interest of the masses of the people?”
This last question has long nagged at Caren. And it was born within another question, one she began asking at age seven.
Caren grew up in a village in Bungoma County, about a nine-hour drive west of Nairobi, Kenya. Her father worked as a court clerk, her mother as secretary to the village chief. They taught their children the value of hard work and determination: that the mind was more powerful than anything else, that they could be anything they wanted to be. What the family had in love and affirmation, however, they lacked in material wealth and at times they couldn’t cover their families’ basic costs. There were some days when the family would have no food, when they couldn’t make their rent payment, when they went to bed at sundown as they had no fuel to light their paraffin lamps. Some days, Caren and her siblings were sent home from school because they could not pay the required fees for attendance.
As a child, looking around her village, her classroom, her church, Caren wondered: “I’m stepping on the same soil, drinking the same water from the same river. So how come one family is thriving with more than they ever needed and other families are barely making it? I thought ‘this is not right.’ There was a sense of injustice in me.”
Caren’s question was not unique. But unlike others who arrive at this same question, Caren did not settle for an absence of answers. She did not resign to the status quo. Instead, she probed for avenues towards justice.
It started with calling out injustice. In primary school, when her math teacher skipped class for over a month, Caren, the 14-year-old class prefect, wrote a letter reporting her teacher to the district education officer.
After making her way through high school with the financial support and mentorship of one of her teachers, Caren enrolled at The University of Nairobi, where, alongside her academic work, she worked to pay her own tuition and send home money for her younger siblings’ school fees. It was there that she discovered the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who sharpened her resolve with the words: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
After one year, Caren was elected to the Student Organization of Nairobi University (SONU) — first as Congress lady, then again as Gender Affairs Secretary and finally as the student union’s first female Vice Chair. Kenya’s student unions are an unofficial training ground for its political leaders, about half of whom begin their careers as student leaders — and they are also the place where political corruption begins. Facing opponents’ bribes and threats of both blackmail and physical violence in the student election as well as witnessing the improper management of the Union’s funds, Caren again refused to be silent. Banding together with other student leaders from public and private universities, Caren started the National Student Leaders Forum (NSLF) to uphold a higher standard of integrity in student unions across Kenya. National ministers and officials quickly came to know of Caren for her integrity and insight into youth leadership through her position as NSLF’s founding Chairperson. As she gained recognition, she was soon called upon to represent her generation in national and continental forums from the African Union’s Peer Review Mechanism to the African Governance Forum where she spoke in 2011.
Sitting at these tables with the continent’s chief decision makers, Caren came to the conclusion that everything hinges on leadership, that “the quality of life that people live is determined by the quality of leaders that they have.” This poses a problem in Africa, where up to $55 billion of revenue is lost annually due to illicit financial flaws. Kenya in particular scored a dismal 28 out of 100 on Transparency International’s 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index — ranking among the top 50 most corrupt nations in the world.
“We have more than enough resources to serve our needs as a people: education, food, sanitation, water,” Caren says. “However, we do not have enough to meet the greed of the few people who are greedy. We have to begin to change that by changing ourselves…Our nation is at a tipping point right now. It needs young people to say no to corruption, young people to stand up and speak out, to make a difference. We need professionals — lawyers, politicians, bankers — who practice professional integrity. Where will they come from?”
Again Caren did not wait for empty answers to this question. Instead, she set out to address Kenya’s “crisis of leadership” — to reinvent the role of leaders as one of service, to redefine success not as acquiring money, power nor fame, but instead as improving others’ lives.
This meant working with young people, those just beginning to cement their values. While school teaches important technical skills, it doesn’t necessarily teach values. Meanwhile, the dominant culture in Kenya, like in many places, encourages many to set their sights on amassing wealth above all else.
Caren founded Emerging Leaders Foundation (ELF) in 2012 to counter this narrative, to connect young people with Kenya’s most ethical leaders, teaching values from integrity to trust to servant leadership. She started mentorship sessions with a few paired mentors and mentees sharing cups of tea in Nairobi parks or The Nairobi Arboretum. Caren failed many times trying to get the program off the ground: a vindictive donor repossessed the office equipment he had provided, she ran out of funding multiple times and, nearly succumbing to the financial pressure, almost abandoned ELF for a more stable job. After a few years of struggle, Caren found that her passion, her grit, even her personal sacrifices, would not be enough to build an entire organization. She needed to learn the practical skills required to facilitate the change in leadership she envisioned in Kenya.
The East African magazine describes Caren as “amiable and pleasant yet possessed of an iron will.” With characteristic resilience, Caren applied twice to Acumen’s East Africa Fellows Program — offering social change agents the tools, training and space to innovate new ideas, accelerate their impact and build a strong network — before she was accepted into the 2014 cohort. The learning for Caren was two-fold: the Acumen Fellowship not only taught her how to run an organization — from the concepts of social entrepreneurship to how to tell her story and fundraise — but also how to help young people grow in her own program. Caren adapted parts of the Acumen Fellowship curriculum and program structure and brought it to ELF.
ELF has since grown from one-on-one mentorship sessions in public parks to a full-fledged six-month leadership training program with learning modules ranging from self-awareness to ethics to the history and Constitution of Kenya. The program has cultivated over 7,500 young Kenyan leaders to date — 98 percent of whom go on to challenge corruption through their roles in government, school systems or as heads of their own organizations. With young people like Oliver Barasa, a trained medic running social accountability audits in healthcare to Eunice Mbithi Vetu, a mortgage advisor at Kenya Commercial Bank, Caren is spreading value-based leadership across sectors to build a better future for Kenya.
As Caren says, becoming an Acumen Fellow “opened doors to so many things,” enabling her to take ELF’s work to greater heights even after her first fellowship year. Through Acumen, Caren came into contact with the Ford Foundation, now a key funder of ELF; Teresa Njoroge, an Acumen Fellow with whom Caren now partners to run the community service module of ELF’s program; and Neha Pandya and Gerald Otim, Acumen Fellows with whom Caren is collaborating to start expanding ELF beyond Kenya to Uganda.
In February, Caren, now 39, sits behind her desk at the ELF office in Nairobi, her face showing no evidence of the nine years that have passed since her speech to the African Governance Forum. Her eyes gleam with the same earnest focus, flashing periodically with a knowing glint of humor or a wide, brilliant smile as she speaks. She has covered so much ground over the last three decades, from questioning inequality in her village to mentoring thousands of young Kenyans, her resolve to seek justice never wavering.
She offers her advice to the leaders following her footsteps: “Never ever give up. Difficult times will come. You will fail. But let nothing shake you…Even the tallest trees have the deepest of roots.”
