Strengthening maternal health systems in northern Kenya

by Robinson Karuga/

Strengthening maternal health systems in northern Kenya

Robinson Karuga & Stella Odhiambo

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Through the UK-funded Healthy Women, Children and Newborns programme, Wasafiri supported efforts to strengthen maternal and newborn health systems in Marsabit and Isiolo counties. In this piece, Robinson Karuga reflects on what it takes to strengthen systems in complex environments. In this case, helping different actors work better together to support mothers and newborns in northern Kenya.

Bringing the system into focus

In Kenya’s northern counties, distance can be the difference between life and death.

For mothers experiencing complications during pregnancy or childbirth, reaching a health facility in time is often the biggest challenge. In counties like Marsabit and Isiolo, long travel distances, limited infrastructure and fragile referral systems have historically made maternal emergencies particularly dangerous.

“The distance between the county headquarters and the farthest point of Marsabit is the equivalent of Limuru to Mombasa,” explains Robinson Karuga. “Now imagine a woman developing complications at that farthest point, on rough roads, in an area prone to insecurity, with no specialist within reach.”

Improving maternal and newborn health outcomes in these contexts requires stronger systems: better coordination, clearer data, and faster ways to move patients through the health system when emergencies arise.

In 2024, the UK government launched the Healthy Women, Children and Newborns programme to strengthen maternal and newborn health systems in Kenya. As part of this work, Wasafiri was commissioned to support the programme’s technical design in Marsabit and Isiolo counties.

The focus was not simply to introduce new tools, but to help counties better understand the realities shaping maternal and newborn health outcomes and prioritise practical actions grounded in data.

What Robinson and the team encountered quickly revealed how layered the challenge really was.

Marsabit is Kenya’s largest county by landmass, with dispersed communities and overstretched health facilities, particularly in remote sub-counties where specialist care is limited. Cultural practices also meant that many deliveries still happened at home, with traditional birth attendants often only escalating cases once complications had become severe.

“The figures we were seeing were already devastating,” Robinson says. “But they were just a fraction of the real number. A lot of it slipped through the cracks.”

For Robinson, one of the biggest issues was fragmentation.

“Different partners were doing important work, but there wasn’t always a shared roadmap guiding how those efforts came together,” he explains.

Root cause analysis and change planning exercises in Isiolo ana Marsabit
Root cause analysis and change planning exercises in Isiolo ana Marsabit

Building around the realities on the ground

The work focused on helping counties prioritise the actions most likely to strengthen maternal and newborn health systems.

This meant bringing together county officials, health facility staff, programme partners and community representatives to build a clearer picture of the systemic challenges and agree on practical priorities.

Robinson recalls that one of the first steps was sitting down with county health management teams and reviewing the data they already had.

“We didn’t want to use guesswork,” he says. “We asked them to present all the data they had collected over the previous year. From there, we could identify the biggest problems and prioritise them.”

What emerged from those sessions revealed the importance of stronger coordination and more grounded planning processes. In some cases, county plans had become routine exercises rather than practical tools for decision-making, while technical and political actors were not always aligned around the same priorities.

To address this, the work went beyond technical planning. Through facilitated workshops, stakeholder mapping exercises and root cause analysis, Wasafiri helped to develop more practical, costed action plans shaped around local realities.

For Robinson, one important lesson was that maternal health outcomes are influenced by far more than the health sector alone.

“The Ministry of Roads should understand that bad roads are also a maternal health issue,” he reflects. “And agriculture should think about nutrition not just as production, but as survival and thriving. These problems are connected.”

That systems perspective became a central part of the work.

One workshop exercise asked health teams to map all the actors whose decisions influenced maternal health outcomes, from county officials and parliamentarians to infrastructure and agriculture actors.

“They had never really thought about working with roads, with agriculture, or even with MPs through that lens before,” Robinson says. “It was eye-opening.”

Root cause analysis and change planning exercises in Isiolo ana Marsabit
Root cause analysis and change planning exercises in Isiolo ana Marsabit

Signs of a stronger system

Health systems change gradually, particularly in contexts facing longstanding structural challenges. Robinson is candid about some of the realities the programme encountered.

During parts of the project, staffing and resource constraints made it difficult for some county teams to consistently participate in planning processes. At the same time, many of the challenges being addressed had developed over many years and could not realistically be resolved through a single intervention.

“Sometimes the best thing you can do is plant seeds and create a critical mass of people who want to solve the problem. But these things require time."

Robinson Karuga

Even so, several of the approaches supported through the programme continue to shape maternal and newborn health efforts in northern Kenya.

In recent years, Kenya has expanded investment in emergency maternal referral systems such as m-Mama, a digital transport coordination model designed to reduce delays for mothers experiencing complications during pregnancy and childbirth.

At county level, investments in maternal health infrastructure have also continued. In Marsabit, the county government recently opened a new maternity wing at Laisamis Hospital, including a neonatal unit and surgical theatre intended to improve access to emergency maternal care in remote areas.

At the same time, digital monitoring systems are becoming increasingly central to maternal health delivery across Kenya, helping counties strengthen visibility of maternal and newborn health indicators and improve decision-making.

For Robinson, these developments reinforce an important lesson from the work in Marsabit and Isiolo.

“Tools alone don’t transform health systems,” he explains. “What matters is creating processes that help people align around shared priorities and act on better information.”

Why systems work matters

Maternal and newborn health challenges in remote regions rarely have simple solutions. They require coordination between governments, health facilities, communities, and development partners, often across vast and difficult landscapes.

Programmes like this highlight how technical support, when focused on system design and collaboration, can help create the foundations for longer-term change.

And while progress can be uneven, the experience in Marsabit and Isiolo offers an important reminder: strengthening the systems that support maternal health can ultimately save lives.

Work like this highlights how thoughtful system design can help complex initiatives move from ambition to coordinated action.

If you are working to design or strengthen programmes that aim to deliver lasting impact, Wasafiri would welcome a conversation.

Photo by Meshack Enock Mwakibuja

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Why we believe lived experience should shape decisions

by Aisha Adan/

Why we believe lived experience should shape decisions

Aisha Adan

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Lots of programmes struggle because the people closest to the problem rarely shape the decisions intended to solve it. In this conversation with Wasafiri’s Inclusion Lead Aisha Adan, we explore why meaningful inclusion matters for systems change.

Across our development and systems change work, participation is often treated as evidence of inclusion. Communities are consulted, workshops are held, and feedback is gathered. Yet, as Aisha Adan explains, being present in a room does not necessarily mean having influence over the decisions being made.

For Aisha, one of the biggest reasons programmes struggle to create lasting change is that they are often designed far from the realities they aim to address. Decisions are shaped by technical expertise, institutional incentives and donor timelines, while the lived experiences of those most affected remain peripheral to strategy and action.

“In complex systems, what really matters is power,” Aisha reflects. “And the people most affected by these problems are often the least influential over programme design, resource allocation and decision-making processes.”

Why isn’t participation enough?

Aisha believes that many institutions still misunderstand what meaningful inclusion requires. For Wasafiri, strengthening inclusion in systems change means creating the conditions for historically excluded groups to genuinely shape priorities, decisions and resources.

“It’s not about how many people are invited into a meeting,” Aisha explains. “It’s about whether those people can meaningfully influence what happens next.”

This requires recognising that different groups experience systems differently and operate within unequal power structures. It also requires treating lived experience as a legitimate and valuable form of evidence alongside technical expertise and data.

From a systems perspective, no single actor holds a complete picture. Better strategies emerge when diverse perspectives help reveal the political realities, relationships and practical conditions shaping how systems actually function.

Aisha
Aisha Adan

What the communities in northern and coastal Kenya showed us

Drawing on Wasafiri’s work through the Nawiri programme in northern Kenya and later experiences connected to the CREATE initiative on the coast of Kenya, Aisha reflected on how exclusion shapes programme decisions and outcomes.

The work revealed that exclusion was political, geographic, generational and gendered. Yet women, young people and pastoralist communities who held deep insight into the drivers of vulnerability and conflict remained excluded from key decision-making spaces.

Through community-led research and dialogue processes, Wasafiri also saw how lived experience frequently challenged institutional assumptions.

Communities highlighted how insecurity, mobility and weak trust in institutions shaped the choices they made and influenced how they navigated everyday realities. These perspectives often exposed dimensions of the system that external actors had poorly understood.

For Aisha, the experience reinforced a critical lesson: even well-intentioned programmes risk reinforcing the very dynamics they hope to change when they fail to understand how power operates within a system, whose knowledge counts, and who gets excluded from shaping solutions.

How Wasafiri works in practice

In practice, Wasafiri supports partners to design processes that bring diverse actors into shared learning and decision-making spaces, particularly those often excluded from formal strategy discussions.

This includes participatory research, systems mapping, community dialogue processes, co-design workshops and learning structures that connect lived experience directly to leadership and governance conversations.

Importantly, Wasafiri does not treat inclusion as a standalone activity. It is embedded into how we develop strategies and gather evidence, too.

Across our work in food systems, peacebuilding and climate, we help organisations spend more time listening to the people closest to the problem and finding practical ways to include them in decisions and action.

Why good ideas still fail

According to Aisha, one of the greatest risks organisations face is designing programmes that appear strong on paper but fail in practice because they are disconnected from how systems actually function.

When these realities are ignored, programmes can unintentionally deepen mistrust or create solutions that communities neither own nor care to sustain.

Aisha also notes that organisations frequently miss critical intelligence when lived experience is excluded from decision-making. People closest to the problem often understand emerging tensions, unintended consequences and windows of opportunity long before institutions do.

Ignoring these perspectives weakens adaptability over time.

What changes when people shape the decisions that affect them

Rather than designing solutions for communities, organisations could begin shaping solutions with them. According to Aisha, this shift creates more resilient partnerships over time. It also improves the quality of decision-making itself because strategies become rooted in a deeper understanding of how systems actually behave, rather than how institutions assume they should behave.

For Wasafiri, this is ultimately what strengthening inclusion for systems change is about: helping people work together, learn as they go, and keep adapting in ways that can create lasting change.

Work like this shows how bringing lived experience and power dynamics into the heart of decision-making can strengthen the effectiveness of complex initiatives. If you are working to ensure programmes are shaped by the realities of those they aim to serve, Wasafiri would love to be part of the conversation. Please reach out to Aisha Adan.

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Waiting for no one: the emerging era of development sovereignty

by Ian Randall/

Waiting for no one: the emerging era of development sovereignty

Ian Randall
Ian Randall

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Three conversations that changed how Ian Randall, and Wasafiri, think about the future of development in Africa

Last year, Overseas Development Assistance to Africa dropped faster than ever before, accelerating a long-term trend. This has triggered a period of creative destruction for anyone involved in African development.

The ODA era had us all oriented externally. What will drive progress now?

For organisations like Wasafiri, committed to making good change happen on the continent, how should we reorient ourselves?

I’ve been trying to listen for this emerging future. At every turn, I hear Africans claiming sovereignty over their development. Africa is waiting for no one.

Exhibit 1: A busy dump

Sam Mburu, in his twenties, is a pro boxer, long-distance runner, and founder of Dandora Green, a social enterprise that works with the waste-pickers at Dandora Dump – the largest waste dump in Kenya. At his invitation, I visited the site.

Five thousand people make their living sifting through Nairobi’s refuse to gather the plastics, metals, organic material, and paper for recycling. Dandora Green collates these pickings, negotiates contracts with buyers, and uses the proceeds to pay the waste-pickers, provide safety equipment, and ensure security.

New legislation is asking consumers to sort their waste at source, and requiring companies to pay for the cost of disposing of their products; generating public revenue that will pay a Ghanaian company to build a modern, efficient, safer sorting plant at Dandora dump.

While clearly progress, these measures will end the informal economy that provides for the waste-pickers. So, Sam is not waiting for anyone. He’s setting up a circular economy centre to retrain his community and create jobs from innovations that will upcycle the sorted waste into products like eco-bricks or t-shirts from recycled plastic.

These are exactly the kind of leaders Wasafiri wants to work with.

Rubbish dump
Sam Mburu pictured at the Dandora dumpsite in Nairobi

Exhibit 2: A birthday party

I joined our friends at the African Population and Health Research Center for their 25th Birthday Party. With hundreds of expert African researchers, they were joyfully celebrating everyone’s professional journey from research assistants to PhDs to cutting-edge studies that are unlocking a healthier future on the continent.

Wasafiri and APHRC colleagues discussed our next joint project, so I asked if partnering with a foreign institution might strengthen our pitch. But APHRC is waiting for no one.

We have partnered with APHRC on various fronts for years. They know the continent better than outsiders and can deliver high-quality research more affordably.

Exhibit 3: A wonky carrot

When Sylvia Kuria started her organic farm, she realised, “No one is coming to help me”. Her business would need to work on a purely commercial basis. Now she is Nairobi’s leading provider of organic food.

Through the African Food Fellowship, Sylvia connected with Wasafiri’s work embedding local farmers and traders in school feeding supply chains in Nairobi’s informal settlements and saw an opportunity. To scale, the meals would need to be affordable for families getting by on very low incomes.

Thankfully, Sylvia waits for no one. She and her fellow farmers have wonky carrots that they can’t sell elsewhere. Now these cut-price vegetables have a market, and Mukuru kwa Njenga’s pupils are studying on a full belly.

Sylvia and Ian at a recent Wasafiri Gathering
Sylvia and Ian at a recent Wasafiri Gathering

What this means for all of us

None of this is to minimise the damage. The collapse in ODA has real human costs, nowhere more painfully than for the people with HIV who depend on anti-retroviral drugs now caught in funding gaps.

But it also seems to have popped the collective delusion that positive change can come from agendas defined and resourced in Brussels, London and D.C.

In the emerging paradigm, Africans are claiming sovereignty over development. People once termed beneficiaries are now partners. Leadership is coming from those who inhabit the complexity of the issues and who will sustain change beyond funding cycles or fickle political agendas.

For Wasafiri, as a consultancy committed to Africa’s future, this new era is exciting. We are orienting ourselves to the leaders like Sam and Sylvia and institutions like APHRC, who are making good change happen.

The question is no longer whether Africa is ready. The question is whether the rest of us can keep up.

Let’s go!

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From pilots to systems change in climate-smart agriculture

by Hannah Metcalfe/

From pilots to systems change in climate-smart agriculture

Hannah Metcalfe

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Climate-smart practices and tech solutions are growing, yet scale remains limited. A regional analysis commissioned by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands-Nairobi and Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) explores why several of these rarely scale, and where the real challenge lies in the systems surrounding them.

Jointly authored by EKN/RVO and Wasafiri

Across East Africa, governments, development partners, and the private sector have invested significantly in climate-smart solutions; from drought-tolerant seed varieties and solar-powered irrigation to digital extension services and carbon finance pilots. Yet a familiar question persists: why, despite years of promising pilots and proven technologies, does meaningful scale remain so elusive?

Part of the challenge is that learning about what works rarely travels far enough. Successes are reported but often are not unpacked in ways that reveal why, where, or under what conditions they succeeded.

The answer, increasingly, is that climate-smart solutions are not a technology problem. It is a systems problem.

Transforming how millions of smallholder farmers manage land, water, and climate risk requires shifting the conditions that determine whether farmers can access tools, afford to adopt them, learn from each other, find profitable markets, and operate in a policy environment that rewards rather than penalises resilience.

To better understand how climate tech solutions are scaling across the region, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Nairobi (EKN) commissioned a regional scoping exercise across East Africa.

The aim was to look across their project portfolio and identify the ways these practices are showing up to address climate change impacts, enhance resilience, and boost adaptation, and to ask what could be scaled or replicated.

The analysis examined programmes across Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Tanzania, spanning climate finance, value chain resilience, smallholder service delivery, digital agriculture, and regenerative practices. Rather than evaluating individual projects, it looked at how climate interventions interact with the wider system, and what conditions enable promising approaches to spread beyond pilot scale.

The findings showed how four systemic factors repeatedly determine whether climate-smart practices stay small or genuinely scale.

ChatGPT image showing the relationships of different bodies overlaying an African farming scene

1. Finance is the gateway to adoption

The most consistent barrier to farmer adoption of climate-smart practices is not a lack of knowledge about what works. It is the inability to bear the upfront cost of change.

Whether the practice in question is improved water harvesting, climate-resilient seed varieties, biodigesters, or sustainable soil management, smallholder farmers routinely understand the long-term benefit. What they cannot always absorb is the short-term risk. The investment required before the returns materialise, in farming seasons where one poor decision can mean real hardship.

Where blended models combine grants, credit, insurance, and income linkages in ways that reduce the cost of first adoption, uptake follows. The programmes demonstrating the greatest traction are those that treat finance not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental design element of climate-smart delivery. Sustainable finance ranked as one of the six core dimensions in assessing how scalable any given approach truly is.

2. Farmer networks are the engine of learning

Climate change is, by definition, a moving target. What works this season may need adjustment next season. The practices that succeed in one agroecological zone may need re-designing in another.

Farmers who are connected to lead farmer networks, producer organisations, peer learning groups, or digitally mediated knowledge exchanges are consistently better positioned to adapt, refine, and pass on what they learn.

The most effective knowledge systems are not top-down. They are peer-driven, locally embedded, and structured to allow learning to flow both ways.

Programmes that invest in building these networks, not just as a delivery mechanism for extension, but as a genuine learning infrastructure, show measurably better outcomes in long-term adoption and resilience.

When farmers trust each other’s experience, they are more willing to try new approaches. And when those networks are connected to digital tools that capture and share what is working, the learning compounds.

3. Private sector active role is what sustains change

Development programmes can finance adoption. They cannot, by themselves, sustain it. The programmes showing the most durable results are those that have managed to align private sector incentives with climate-smart outcomes, where the commercial logic and the climate logic point in the same direction.

This alignment takes different forms. In some cases, it is agribusinesses or off-takers willing to pay a premium for produce that meets environmental or sustainability standards, giving farmers a direct market signal that climate-smart practices pay.

In others, it is input suppliers and service providers who see a commercial opportunity in serving smallholder farmers better, and who build business models that make sustainable inputs more accessible and affordable.

In others, it is blended financing arrangements that make it commercially viable for the private sector to operate in markets that would otherwise be too risky.

The common thread is that when private sector actors have a genuine commercial stake in climate-smart outcomes, the resulting change has staying power that grant-funded programmes alone cannot provide.

4. Government alignment is what enables scale

Even the most well-financed and commercially viable climate-smart initiatives will struggle to reach national scale without enabling policy. But in many East African countries, including Kenya, the policy gap is not what it once was.

Kenya has comprehensive, well-drafted frameworks for climate change mitigation, adaptation, and food security. What consistently falls short is implementation and enforcement: translating national commitments into the subnational structures, resourcing, and political will needed to create effective change.

Programmes operating in environments where governments are actively aligned with climate-smart goals, often through supportive regulation, public investment, and political commitment, achieve far greater reach than those that are not.

One biodigester initiative in Uganda illustrated this directly: a significant part of its success was the active partnership between the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Agriculture, whose coordinated support helped increase the adoption and availability of biodigesters in the country.

Embedding climate-smart practices within public systems, rather than running parallel to them, is consistently what gives programmes the durability to outlast any individual donor cycle.

Scaling is not what happens after a programme ends. It is what happens when a system has been changed enough that it continues to move in the right direction without external push.

Looking back

The volume and variety of climate-relevant work identified in this analysis are notable. EKN, RVO, and the Food, Nutrition, and Security teams are clearly doing serious work in this space, and perhaps the most telling indicator is how consistently climate approaches are showing up in programmes that were never explicitly designed to address it.

These are projects built around increasing productivity, market access, or value chain development that have, in practice, become vehicles for climate adaptation and resilience because the teams implementing them recognise that climate change is one of the most significant barriers standing between farmers and food security.

But the scale of what is needed means that no single development partner, however committed and however well-positioned, can drive this transition alone.

The regional analysis points to a clear conclusion: the next generation of climate-smart solution programmes must be designed with systems change in mind. That means treating finance, farmer networks, private sector incentives, and government alignment as interdependent levers that need to move together.

RVO and EKN’s commitment to understanding this landscape and to looking across the full portfolio of Dutch-funded programming and asking hard questions about what actually enables scale, reflects the kind of strategic, evidence-based leadership that the sector needs more of.

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Image generated using AI on ChatGPT.

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Meet the girl who wanted to build roads (and factories)

by Gacoki Kipruto/

Meet the girl who wanted to build roads (and factories)

Gacoki Kipruto

Gacoki Kipruto & Stella Odhiambo

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A glimpse into the mind and work of Gacoki Kipruto, Wasafiri’s new Partnerships Manager.

When Gacoki Kipruto was eight years old, she stood at her aunt’s home in Othaya, central Kenya. Plum trees were heavy with fruit, so abundant they couldn’t be eaten, sold, or given away. At the very same time, other parts of Kenya were facing hunger. In her mind, she could see the solution clearly. It was simple: take the food to where it was needed. Problem solved, right?

“Unfortunately, there are no roads,” she was told.

And that answer stayed with her.

It sparked two early ambitions for Gacoki: to one day build the roads that could connect food to people, and to start a plum jam factory so that nothing would go to waste. It was her first encounter with a broken system. And her first instinct was to fix it.

Today, as Partnerships Manager at Wasafiri and Kenya Country Lead at the African Food Fellowship (AFF), Gacoki is doing the work of connecting what exists but doesn’t yet work together.

Gacoki speaking at an AFF event
Gacoki speaking at an AFF event

Learning to see the whole system

Gacoki’s path into systems change wasn’t linear, but that was intentional. Trained in marketing, she quickly found herself drawn to shaping how ideas, services, and solutions reach the people who need them most.

Her early work with organisations like the Eastern African Farmers Federation introduced her to the mechanics of development, such as value chains, financial inclusion, and the quiet complexity of making markets work for those often left out.

Over time, her work spanned agriculture, renewable energy, governance, and inclusive finance. This cross-sector experience gave her the ability to see patterns across systems and identify where connections are missing. An ability she now relies on deeply.

“I’m able to look at a problem from different POVs at once,” she says. “Not just as an agriculture issue, or a nutrition issue, but where those things meet.”

That ability to see the whole while working within the parts is at the heart of her role today.

Bringing people together to move change

At Wasafiri, Gacoki operates at the intersection of relationships and results. She describes Wasafiri as a “first responder”, the one you call when a system isn’t working.

Her work is to bring the right people into the room, help them see the system more clearly, and support them to move forward together by creating the conditions for new discovery.

“I really enjoy facilitation,” she says enthusiastically. “Bringing people to the table and helping them develop their own thinking to discover what’s possible – I love that.”

It’s a style that runs counter to more direct approaches. Gacoki asks the questions that unlock clarity, then helps shape that clarity into action. This approach is amplified through her work with the African Food Fellowship, where she works closely with a diverse network of leaders across Kenya and Africa’s food system. There, she spots opportunities for collaboration, linking ideas, and creating the kind of synergy where “one plus one becomes five.”

What makes her particularly effective is her ability to move fluidly between worlds. She is as comfortable speaking with policymakers and donors as she is with farmers and grassroots organisations. It’s a skill, she says, that is built from curiosity, a trait she names as central to who she is.

“Sometimes you’re a connector. Sometimes you’re documenting what’s working. Sometimes you’re amplifying it,” she explains. “Each person plays their role, but in concert with others.”

What lies ahead?

Looking ahead, Gacoki is energised by the growing recognition that complex challenges cannot be solved in isolation. “There is a sense of urgency about how to respond to a rapidly changing world,” she says.

“I want Wasafiri to be the place people turn to when they need to make sense of complexity, and when they need to think through what to do next.”

It’s a vision that echoes the thinking of that eight-year-old girl, standing between abundance and need, asking a simple question: how do we connect the two?

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New publication: our recent work with Climate KIC on intermediaries, funding and systems change

by Kate Simpson/

New publication: our recent work with Climate KIC on intermediaries, funding and systems change

Kate Simpson
Kate Simpson

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Are you an intermediary organisation holding relationships that don’t neatly align?

Translating between languages that don’t quite match? Are you expected to deliver certainty in situations defined by uncertainty and be accountable to multiple worlds at once, such as funders, communities, institutions, and partners, all with different incentives, timelines and definitions of success?

If this sounds like you, then this recent paper published by Climate KIC and supported by Wasafiri is for you. The paper is the output of a Global Community of Practice of intermediary organisations, all working in the space of climate adaptation and resilience, but speaks to the tensions intermediary organisations everywhere navigate.

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Turning shared ambition into coordinated action

by Stella Odhiambo/

Turning shared ambition into coordinated action

Stella Odhiambo

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How Wasafiri helped align partners to move Grow Africa from vision to implementation and collective momentum

Many multi-stakeholder initiatives stall not because ambition is lacking, but because alignment never fully happens.

The vision is strong. The partners are credible. Political will exists. And yet progress moves far more slowly than expected.

More often than not, the challenge is alignment.

When the World Economic Forum and partners shaped Grow Africa, the ambition was clear: to strengthen collaboration and mobilise investment in African agriculture. Governments, businesses and development actors were engaged. Energy was present.

But ambition alone is not enough to move a system.

In complex environments, actors operate with different incentives, accountabilities and time horizons. Without deliberate alignment, even committed partners can pull in parallel rather than in concert. This is a familiar pattern in complex initiatives. Partners agree on the destination, but struggle to agree on priorities, sequencing, and how their efforts fit together in practice.

Our role was to help partners move from shared aspiration to clearer direction and coordinated action. This meant creating space for honest conversations about roles, priorities and decision-making. It meant looking at the system as a whole — where influence sat, where friction lay, and which shifts could unlock progress.

Rather than adding another layer of strategy, the emphasis was on strengthening the collective ability to decide and act together, and to adapt as conditions changed. This is where our Systemcraft approach became important.

Rather than focusing only on plans or individual actors, Systemcraft helped us look at the incentives, relationships, power dynamics and decision-making structures that shape how change actually happens. By helping partners surface these dynamics together, the process created shared clarity on priorities, roles, and points of leverage.

In practice, this helped partners see how their individual efforts connected to a wider agenda, where coordination was needed, and what practical pathways could move the platform forward. The focus was not simply on designing a strategy, but on strengthening the system’s capacity to align, decide and act collectively.

Over time, the platform reported clearer priorities and stronger coordination across participating actors. Conversations shifted from broad aspiration to practical next steps. Participants were better able to see how their contributions connected to a shared agenda, reducing duplication and strengthening confidence in the platform’s direction.

Grow Africa helped catalyse more than US $10 billion in private-sector investment commitments in African agriculture, with over US $1.8 billion implemented1. Public reporting also indicates these investments reached more than 8.6 million smallholder farmers and created around 58,000 jobs.2

While no single intervention can claim sole credit in a system of this scale, the experience reinforced a core insight: coordinated action is what enables ambition to translate into credible outcomes. For leaders responsible for turning ambition into movement, this capability can be the difference between activity and traction.

Facilitating Action Planning for Systems Change is one of the ways we support partners working on complex challenges. If you would like to explore how this could strengthen your own initiative, please reach out to Ian Randall.

1Partnering to Achieve African Agriculture Transformation (Grow Africa report)

2Grow Africa Leadership Council CoConveners Statement (African Union)

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Unlocking Africa’s Digital Future Through Partnership and Experimentation

by Cecilia Mwangi/

Unlocking Africa’s Digital Future Through Partnership and Experimentation

Cecilia Mwangi

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Across Africa, technology is shaping how people learn, heal, trade, and entertain themselves.

From mobile money to AI-powered health platforms, digital innovation is opening doors that once seemed firmly shut. But if there is one thing that came through clearly in a recent gathering partner convening, it is this: technology alone will not deliver transformation. It is the ecosystem around it that will. The partnerships, financing, and the culture of experimentation is what will determine whether Africa’s digital future is inclusive, sustainable, and rooted in impact.

At Wasafiri, we see this every day in our work alongside partners across Africa and beyond. Our network of systems-change consultants helps organisations step back, see the bigger picture, and build the collaborations needed to turn innovation into lasting impact. The insights we’ve recently gathered strongly echo the themes that are shaping Africa’s digital future.

Cecilia speaking at a Porticus partner convening workshop
Cecilia speaking at the Porticus Rooted for Impact partner convening in Nairobi. 2025

Tech for Good is more than gadgets and apps

The phrase Tech for Good is gaining momentum across the continent, and rightly so. It captures the idea that innovation is not just about shiny apps or impressive code, but about solving real problems in ways that expand dignity and opportunity for the millions who need it.

Take HEAL, a survivor-centric digital mental health platform designed in Kenya to support those who have experienced sexual and gender-based violence. It combines the reach of technology with the sensitivity of culturally attuned counselling, offering confidential support through an AI-powered therapist. This is Tech for Good at its best. It meets people where they are, with tools that respond to urgent social needs.

And the potential goes far beyond health. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, AI alone could add up to US $1.5 trillion to Africa’s economy by 2030 if the continent captures just 10% of the global AI market.1

Applications range from boosting climate resilience to expanding access to finance and education. Done right, digital innovation can become one of the greatest equalisers of our time.

Why experimentation matters

A shift in mindset from seeing innovation as a high-risk gamble to embracing it as a process of trial, learning, and adaptation will take experimentation. A scary notion for many.

Africa needs to create spaces where startups, researchers, and development partners can “fail fast” and “learn faster”. Iterative prototyping, open innovation, and bold experimentation are essential tools for navigating uncertainty and making limited resources go further.

When innovators have the freedom to test, pivot, and refine, they find creative solutions that rigid, risk-averse systems overlook. This agility is what allows new ideas to grow from fragile pilots into scalable, life-changing services.

The role of policymakers, investors, and funders here is clear: to create safe conditions for experimentation. That means financing early-stage pilots, supporting incubators, running case competitions, and backing mentorship across sectors. By backing the process as much as the product, they enable innovators to take the risks that lead to breakthroughs.

Cecilia speaking at a Porticus partner convening workshop
Cecilia speaking at a Porticus partner convening workshop in Nairobi

Partnerships as the engine of scale

But no single innovator or organisation can build the future alone. Strong partnerships are the glue that holds Africa’s innovation ecosystem together.

We have already seen how collaboration between governments, private investors, civil society, and academia can spark progress. For example, when mobile money took root in East Africa, it scaled because regulators allowed space for experimentation, because telcos invested in infrastructure, and because communities quickly integrated it into daily life.

The same is true today. Whether it’s scaling an ed-tech platform across borders or embedding renewable energy solutions in rural communities, the challenge is less about inventing the technology and more about weaving the right web of relationships around it. Trust, shared vision, and joint investment are what turn bright ideas into systemic transformation.

This is also where Wasafiri has found our role: helping partners see the bigger picture, convene unlikely coalitions, and design the collaborative platforms that enable innovation to take root and scale.

Mobilising capital for African-led innovation

If partnerships are the engine, capital is the fuel. And here, Africa still faces a stubborn gap. Too often, funding for innovation is short-term, donor-driven, or externally designed, leaving local innovators struggling to grow beyond the initial or start-up stages.

This is beginning to change. More African investors are entering the field, and global players are recognising the importance of long-term, locally anchored finance. But the shift needs to accelerate.

Sustainable financing means aligning investment strategies with systemic outcomes. It means measuring success in equity, resilience, and social impact, and not just profits.

At the recent convening, we see that there is also an urgent need to make capital more inclusive. By 2030, Africa is projected to create 230 million new digital jobs, and over 650 million people will need to reskill or upskill2. Ensuring that women, youth, and marginalised groups can access the resources to participate in this future is not optional; it is foundational.

Seeing the bigger picture

At the heart of these conversations lies a hopeful vision. To get there, three shifts are essential:

  1. Embracing a culture of experimentation – normalising “fail fast, learn faster” approaches so that innovation becomes a process of discovery, not a single bet.
  2. Strengthening collaborative ecosystems – building partnerships across sectors and borders to scale what works.
  3. Mobilising sustainable capital – unlocking financing that is long-term, inclusive, and impact-driven.

It is easy to get swept up in headlines about AI breakthroughs or the latest startup on the block. But the deeper story is not about the technology itself. It is about people and the systems they create together.

We believe that Tech for Good in Africa is ultimately a collective endeavour. It is about ensuring that the digital future is not something that happens to Africans, but something shaped by Africans, for Africans.

  1. https://cioafrica.co/tapping-into-ai-to-inspire-inclusion-for-women/
  2. https://www.ifc.org/en/pressroom/2019/ifc-report-finds-130-billion-opportunity-in-digital-skills-across-sub-saharan-africa

    https://www.mastercard.com/news/media/ue4fmcc5/mastercard-ai-in-africa-2025.pdf

    https://technext24.com/2025/05/23/230-million-digital-jobs-created-by-2030/
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What a fishing village taught me about transforming complex systems

by Ledama Masidza/

What a fishing village taught me about transforming complex systems

Ledama Masidza
Ledama Masidza

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An interview with Ledama Masidza

When you meet Ledama Masidza, you quickly sense his deep bond with the ocean.

A Marine Conservationist, Indigenous Food Systems Advocate, and natural storyteller, he has dedicated his young and impressive career to working with fishing communities to restore balance between livelihoods and marine life.

Among his proudest achievements is helping secure user rights for a 12,000-hectare co-managed marine area on Kenya’s coast, an effort that has drawn global attention.

Ledama’s journey into conservation began in his childhood, watching how coastal communities depended on the ocean for survival while struggling to keep it alive. That early awareness grew into a passion he carried through university and into his first role in Kuruwitu, a small fishing village in Kilifi County. It was there, he says, that “the ocean became my first classroom in leadership.”

In this conversation with Stella Odhiambo, Ledama shares what he learned in Kuruwitu, why community ownership matters, and how applying a systems approach reveals that youth and local communities already hold the keys to lasting solutions.

Ledama filming for an upcoming documentary
Ledama filming for an upcoming documentary

What first drew you to working with the ocean and coastal communities?

The ocean was my first classroom in leadership. Right after graduating, I found myself in Kuruwitu, a small coastal village in Kilifi County, some 36 or so kilometres from Mombasa, Kenya.

I was working as an environmental program manager, supporting a 30-hectare Locally Managed Marine Area. I would spend long hours restoring coral, doing research, and filming this incredible sanctuary.

Inside, life flourished. Outside, I would find discarded nets, turtles trapped, and reefs stripped bare. It broke my heart. I knew we couldn’t only protect small pockets of ocean…we had to restore the wider seascape. And that could only happen with the community fully in the lead.

What was happening in Kuruwitu’s fisheries, and why was change so urgent?

By 1999, the Kuruwitu fishery had collapsed. 5,000 metric tonnes of fish gone. Regulations existed but were weakly enforced. Beach Management Units, which were supposed to lead governance, had no resources, no training, no leadership support. And unlike land, the ocean has no title deeds.

Fish swim across boundaries. How do you secure tenure over food that moves? That reality pushed me to see conservation differently: you can’t eat conservation. Real conservation is about both biodiversity and livelihoods.

Families were struggling. Fishers would go out to sea and return empty-handed. Young people had little reason to see fishing as a viable future. Without urgent action, both culture and ecology were at risk. That urgency forced us to ask: what would it take to build a community-led system that lasts?

Ledama graduating from the African Food Fellowship
Ledama graduating from the African Food Fellowship

Building a functional, community-led governance system sounds complex. At Wasafiri, we use Systemcraft as a way to make sense of such change. Did you see this approach at play in Kuruwitu?

Absolutely. Supported by Oceans Alive and the Kuruwitu Beach Management Unit, the steps we took align closely with the five dimensions of Systemcraft. My understanding of this approach deepened when I became a fellow of the African Food Fellowship and saw these same dimensions applied not just to oceans, but to food systems across Africa. I saw it lead to real environmental impact.

It began with organising for collaboration. The Beach Management Unit needed legitimacy. So I helped them hold elections. Yes, 21-year-old me! We had to update their constitution and secure legal standing. Without that collective structure, nothing else could have taken root.

Then we had to set the direction. Mapping the fishing grounds with researchers gave the community a clear picture of their territory. Seeing it on a map created a shared sense of responsibility: this is ours to protect.

From there, we turned to harnessing collective intelligence. Not so simple when wary NGO’s refused to share their data with us. We were looking at 1-year-old studies. So we carried out new surveys with fishers, co-creating a baseline of data. This wasn’t abstract research; it was knowledge the community could use to guide decisions.

To make it matter, we brought everyone into the process. I’ll never forget taking stakeholders snorkelling: inside the sanctuary, the reefs teemed with life; outside, they were barren. That single experience spoke louder than any report. I believe it fanned a shared urgency for action.

Finally, we had to change the incentives. Together, the community drafted bylaws on fishing gear, enforcement, and surveillance. It wasn’t easy – because in truth, a broken system works for some people or some of the time. There was definitely some resistance to change, and debates often grew heated. But over time, the rules began to shift behaviours, rewarding stewardship over short-term gain, and giving fishers a reason to protect rather than exploit.

And when the government granted official recognition, it brought us full circle to collaboration again. This time on a larger scale. The community now had both the authority and the partnerships to act as true stewards of their ocean.

Ledama at the Africa Youth Summit in 2024
Ledama at the Africa Youth Summit in 2024

Why is community ownership essential for lasting conservation solutions?

Because only the community can balance survival with stewardship. Outsiders may bring funding or science, but if families go hungry, no project will last. Ownership transforms conservation from an external agenda into a practice rooted in culture and livelihood.

What lessons from Kuruwitu can be applied to wider food systems?

The lesson is this: solutions already exist within communities. Youth and local leaders know their realities better than anyone else. With space, knowledge, and resources, they can transform entire systems, whether fisheries, forests, or food systems.

You’ve described this process as "Collective System Action." How does that link to your approach today?

Collective System Action means no single project or actor can drive transformation alone. Change requires shifting incentives, coordinating coalitions, setting clear direction, making it matter to people’s lives, and continuously learning. That’s what we lived through in Kuruwitu. It wasn’t a linear project; it was a systems journey.

Ledama at COP28
Ledama at COP28

Looking ahead, why do you believe global solutions can and should come from Africa?

Because we’ve already shown it’s possible. What started in Kuruwitu became a model shared at the World Conservation Congress and at COP. From there, it inspired adoption at different levels: by organisations such as African governments and the African Protected Areas Congress at a continental scale, and by global bodies through platforms like Nature Seychelles and the World Conservation Congress.

Today, I co-founded the Local and Indigenous Food Systems Transformation Network (LIFT), connecting communities across continents. Turns out the ideas born on an African coast, a small fishing village, can inspire the world.

In conclusion, systems thinking is not an abstract theory. It is a living, adaptable practice. What Ledama helped build in Kuruwitu shows that communities and youth hold the keys to solving global challenges, starting right here in Africa.

If you’re grappling with a complex social issue and want to understand our approach Systemcraft a little better, see what our easy to grasp, self-led course is all about here: Systemcraft Essentials course by Wasafiri

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