Nuru Foundation Team Leader Update: Building Sustainability in Kuria

Local revenue growth + expense management = sustainability

A big part of what we’re working on here is staying ‘scrappy’ while growing in size.  We aspire to continually find ways to reduce expenses while maximizing impact. Additionally, we’re focused on increasing the amount of revenue we generate from our Income Generating Activities (IGA) program, so that Nuru can sustainably operate after the exit of US funding.

We now have over 180 staff partners working in throughout our communities of service. As our geographic reach has grown, so too have our staff training costs. We believe in investing heavily in our local staff capacity (see our Leadership program for more details on this), which means staff members attending regular trainings and professional development sessions. With our growing staff, the cost of transporting so many staff has increased dramatically.

So, Chairman Philip Mohochi and the rest of the executive team constructed a hostel, designed to significantly reduce the cost of these trainings. Staff members are able to stay over night during multi-day training sessions, saving us a bundle on transport costs. Additionally, the vision is to begin using the hostel as a revenue generating activity – whenever not in use hosting our own staff for trainings, we will be renting rooms to travelers, outside seminars and events, etc. Chairman has a great vision for this, and has already reached out to several of the hotels in town, getting advice while benchmarking our prices against theirs.

While not yet completely finished, the hostel will soon be online, reducing our expenses while increasing our income. Exactly what we hope to do for long-run sustainability.