Alex - Director of Development

Alex is a Kenyan human rights defender, and for most of the decade he has spent doing that work, it has meant raising the money that makes it possible. In Kibera it was uniforms, fees and food for children, gathered from neighbours and small local donors. His work there saw more than fifty of those children finishing their primary school education. What he learned there has shaped every campaign since: keeping one child in a classroom takes a village of people willing to give something, and the work of a fundraiser is knowing that village well enough to ask.

In Narok County, working alongside people living with albinism and with disabilities, it was funds and official attention enough to put healthcare within reach for the marginalized people in that community, a place where stigma and the price of treatment reinforce each other. There, he found that inequality is usually maintained by silence — and the first cost of breaking it is borne by whoever speaks. With the Ford Foundation–funded Project Pakati, it was co-creating a directory of youth-led and youth-serving organizations in Africa where he on boarded more than 30 organisations across East, West, Central and North Africa. The directory was built so that donors could finally see who was already doing the work.

The right to learn, the right to be treated, the right to be counted: all of it is human rights work, and none of it arrives unfunded. The conviction he formed early that has never changed is that talent is distributed equally, opportunity is not.

He is a Certified Professional Mediator and a published author, having written a book about how the reality a society agrees to accept keeps cycles of exclusion intact, and he is currently studying international studies at the University of Nairobi. At Places to Thrive he brings a decade of asking the only two questions that matter in development: what does this person actually need, and who can be persuaded to provide it.