Nuru Kenya Leadership Program: Facilitating Innovation

One of the most inspiring things about working for Nuru is being able witness our local leaders’ amazing ability to create innovative solutions to end extreme poverty. Whether it’s designing a new loan package for farmers, working with cutting-edge technologies in the field, or partnering with ground-breaking non-profit organizations; Nuru Kenya’s program managers are constantly reassessing and improving on the way we fight extreme poverty. By using the co-creation process and tapping into local leaders’ knowledge about the community, these poverty-fighting pioneers are changing the way we approach the problem of extreme poverty.

One of the key pillars of the Leadership Program is the idea of co-creation. The idea is simple: by working together and combining individual expertise, more innovative and lasting solutions can be developed. Each of these local leaders has a unique background and skillset that can be a valuable resource to other programs; thus, there is a need to extend our training series to better cater to the upper-level staff of Nuru Kenya.

After understanding that there was a need for stronger collaboration between Nuru Kenya’s amazing program managers, the Leadership team, led by Robert Kihara, began developing a training series, based on the co-creation method that would help equip the upper-level staff to adapt to future challenges. This training series, called Level 2 training, is an extension of our Level 1 training series, with modules focused on servant leadership, project management, and feedback at the managerial level. The culmination of these modules is our design summit- an intensive and collaborative training series and workshop that will help program managers strengthen their ability to design impactful, sustainable, and scalable programs. This training module simulates a wide-range of potential challenges and provides a forum where innovative solutions can be created, debated, analyzed and eventually, implemented. Given the track-record of innovation at Nuru, there is no doubt that this new training series will lead to more innovative solutions and contribute to the end of extreme poverty.

About Brian Viani

Leadership Program Strategic Advisor — Born and raised in New York City, Brian has a BA in Political Science and English Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton and an MA in International Relations from New York University, where he received the 2011 Lauren Moilien Johnson Human Rights Award.