Well, because we now actually have program indicators for all of the impact programs as well as leadership, the pressure is on. The Leadership program, which is a rather new program (comparatively) and shares the difficult attributes of being a slight challenge to explain and perhaps the most important program we have, brought up the …
I am in Palo Alto this week and last to meet with Jake and the rest of the Senior Leadership Team and to work with FT8, the newest group of folks who are heading to Kenya to work at the project site. This group consists of all new people, which is a first for us …
There were certain core beliefs that Nuru International began with several years ago most of which have been discussed thoroughly on these blogs. I will not introduce anything new here, but we are doing something we had not done before to move towards these core beliefs that Nuru was founded on. Since you have already …
The past few weeks have been some busy ones with many discoveries and preparations for reinstating homevisits and scaling to two new divisions later this year. I’ve been working hard with Matt Lee and Lindsay Cope to make the necessary changes and additions to our programs, which we will blog about in in more detail …
I thought it would cool to share some more stories about the awesome staff that we are honored to work alongside here in Kenya. Today, I’d like to share the story of Elias Nyaitange, our program leader. I asked him how Nuru has changed his life, and here was his answer.
We have had a fantastic first term in the school year here in Isibania. We received a lot of praise and accolades from local school heads and the Education Ministry, but the praise that has meant the most has come from the students themselves. It is incredible to enter a classroom and have the children …
Commodities has two goals: to generate income for Nuru Kenya, and to support the work of the Health Program. The latter is more important than the former. The reason for this is the way in which our Health Program is structured, with the focus on teaching people to practice healthy behaviors. Commodities helps to make …
Nuru International focuses on developing the key leadership skills and critical thinking capacity of its leaders to build organizational sustainability. The ability of Nuru Kenya to support and reinvent itself is fundamental to adapt and scale operations. The challenge is to remain consistent, true, and focused on the program goal in each area. For agriculture, …
The abbreviation MPAT means Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool, developed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which is a UN specialized agency dedicated in rural poverty reduction. I was very excited when my former program manager, Jamie Frederick in 2011 informed me one beautiful morning that we would be using the tool to assess the …
I spent a couple of days this week creating a deck that draws upon a lot of the knowledge I gained from working at Booz Allen Hamilton and Booz & Company from 2005 through 2008. During that time I was lucky enough to work with a few program management experts like Eric Kronenberg. I learned …
Our parents always said the rules were there to protect us, to help us and because they loved us. As we grew up, and some of us even became parents ourselves, we saw the truth behind what our parents always said. We saw the reason for the rules, even if the benefits were long term …
Well, we’ve got some bad news…latrine sales have not been as high as we have hoped. Despite the positive feedback we’d gotten from the community about our role plays, this has not translated into a lot of purchases. Although we’re a bit disappointed, we knew from our research that this was going to be a …
I mentioned a few weeks ago that we have gathered a lot of data related to many of our program metrics. The analysis and QC that we were conducting back then and have continued since have gone very well. At this point we have finished the first round of analysis and QCing for the baseline …
During all of December and January, Nuru Agriculture is distributing loans of agriculture inputs (fertilizer and seed) for maize production to approximately 3,000 smallholder farmers in Kuria, Kenya. Nuru Agriculture provides agricultural loans as one critical element of its complete farmer package, which includes technical trainings, organization of farmers into small work groups, and agriculture …
Click here to read this post in the New York Times. These days, I spend most of my time hiking the rolling hills and valleys of Kuria, a remote district in rural Kenya. I’m on a very different career path now than I was before, as a Marine patrolling streets and alleys in Iraq. In …