Behind the Impact: Real Stories from SheEO Foundation

  For more than a decade, Tina was a businesswoman. In 2014, with just KSh 15,000 , she started selling onions and omena in her local market, in Kibera. The business was modest, but it worked. Her cohort was onboarded into SheEO MAP.  She learned how to manage stock. She understood customer behavior. She mastered daily cash flow. At the end of a good day, Tina earned about KSh 500, and now she was looking to grow that. That income supported not just Tina, but her dependants as well. Like many women in Kenya’s informal economy, Tina’s business was more than a source of income. It was stability. It was dignity. It was independence. Then, in August 2025, A month before graduating SheEO MAP, everything collapsed. Railway authorities came and reclaimed the trading spaces where Tina and many others operated. Her stall was destroyed. In a single moment, years of hard work disappeared. No inventory. No stall. No income. No clear path forward. The loss was devastati...

There is a phrase that keeps coming back to us when we think about Roseline. A blow. Not a death. We didn't coin it. She lived it. Roseline runs an M-Pesa agency in Kibera. She also runs a bookshop, and alongside it, a beverage business she started when she got a fridge from Coca-Cola and stocked it with soft drinks and water for her M-Pesa and bookshop clients. Three streams from one location, built by one woman, serving one community. Then, within weeks, she lost nearly all of it. A fraudster walked into her shop while she was away and her employee was alone. The employee was drugged. The entire KES 30,000 M-Pesa float was sent out—gone before anyone could stop it. Then came the demolitions. Her location was razed. The beverage business she had barely started was suspended before it had a chance to prove itself. At this point in the story, most people would have stopped. The rational response to two catastrophic losses in quick succession—fraud, then forced displacement—is ...