Nuru Kenya Awarded 2025 Nuru Innovation Prize

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 22, 2024

Contact: Casey Harrison | info@nuruinternational.org 

Washington, D.C. – Nuru Kenya, led by Managing Director Pauline Wambeti, has been named the winner of the 2025 Nuru Innovation Prize. The goal of the prize is to enable learning and inspire innovation across the Nuru Collective of local NGOs. This $20,000 prize is awarded annually by the Nuru Collective to a member organization with an innovative intervention that will deliver sustainable impact for rural communities. Upon distribution of funds in early 2025, Nuru Kenya will use its prize money to purchase, provide training on, and distribute handheld audio learning devices to support ongoing agricultural and business training in low-literacy environments in Baringo County. 

This is the second year the Nuru Innovation Prize has been awarded. Each year, a selection committee, composed of staff from across the Nuru Collective, evaluates prize submissions from each Nuru Collective organization member. Prize submissions are evaluated based on six criteria: 

1. Climate Change & Digitalization: The innovation must address climate change and digital development challenges or barriers. It should represent a novel or new idea for the organization. 
2. Demand: There must be a clear need or demand for the innovation from farmers, communities, and/or agribusinesses.
3. Value Addition: The innovation must generate a measurable impact for farmers and/or agribusinesses.
4. Limited Added Costs: The innovation should not generate significant production or operating costs for farmers or their agribusinesses.
5. Overcomes an inefficiency: The innovation must help farmers and/or agribusinesses overcome a clearly articulated challenge or problem.
6. Adaptability: The innovation must be  aligned with the organization’s annual operational plan and strategic objectives. 

Nuru Kenya also won the 2024 inaugural prize. The prize money was used in Baringo County, Kenya, to pilot a new activity: the combined usage of hydrogel and zai pits. Nuru Kenya tested this activity with farmers in Baringo County, supporting their access to high-quality seedlings, along with hydrogel–a sticky substance that can hold 500-600 times its own weight in water, absorbs water quickly, and then slowly releases water over time. Farmers were then trained on establishing zai pits–an agricultural practice that promotes the conservation of water. By combining the hydrogel with the zai pit technology, farmers in the semi-arid region of Baringo County began learning how to capitalize on one of their most precious resources–water. While Baringo County farmers still have much to learn about climate change adaptation in the years ahead, this pilot intervention was a first step in the journey toward climate resilience. 

“Nuru Kenya has won the award twice in a row. We did not plan on such a feat. We were pleasantly surprised by the outcome. We have been working in rural Kenya for over 15 years now, navigating myriad societal challenges in order to achieve our goals. The dynamic nature of the issues we deal with calls for continued creativity, innovation, and research to ensure we constantly iterate and make bold decisions. We understand that ‘innovation waters the roots of prosperity’. We have expanded into more challenging areas, hence the need for the team to remain resolute in exploring appropriate techniques applicable in these contexts. We do not get limited by challenges. Instead, we challenge the limits, hence the drive to incorporate new information and technologies to empower our farmers to grow smarter, so the harvest grows richer. These efforts have paid off for the two consecutive years of the innovation award competition.“

-Pauline Wambeti, Nuru Kenya Managing Director 

In 2025, Nuru Kenya will receive the $20,000 prize to purchase handheld audio learning devices and offer training to Baringo County rural entrepreneurs on the use of these devices. Low rates of literacy present increased challenges for supporting rural livelihoods in Baringo County. Training in local languages can be uploaded to the audio devices, allowing for clear communication and opportunities for users to listen to lessons multiple times to learn key concepts. Future lessons will include business development, financial training, agricultural livelihoods training, and more. Once distributed, the devices can be reused frequently over time, making this a cost-effective way to support training efforts. In October 2025, Nuru Kenya will report back to the Nuru Collective on how this innovation impacted training efforts, allowing the rest of the Nuru Collective to learn from Nuru Kenya’s experience.

The Nuru Collective is proud to celebrate innovative thinking and creative adaptation efforts amid the challenging environments where it works. The 2026 Nuru Innovation Prize submissions will be evaluated in August 2025, with the winner announced in October 2025. 

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Nuru Kenya:

Established in 2008, Nuru Kenya is a locally-led organization in Kenya and a member of the Nuru Collective. Nuru Kenya’s mission is to build the resilience of smallholder agricultural communities in six counties of remote rural Kenya by eradicating extreme poverty and establishing sustainable locally-owned agribusinesses by 2030.

About Nuru:

Established in 2008, Nuru is a 501(c)(3) organization and the convener of the Nuru Collective, a network of organizations with a shared vision of a world without cycles of unjust poverty, where resilience and hope are cultivated in the most marginalized communities. Through locally-led approaches, Nuru works in five countries in Africa: Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Ghana.