Before Agape CBO ran a single health day or mentorship session, our founding members held an open community baraza in Kasarani with one purpose: to ask residents directly what kind of support was missing, rather than assuming we already knew.
The answers shaped nearly everything that followed. Residents raised how isolated widows in the area often became after the initial period of sympathy visits ended, the lack of structured mentorship for young people beyond school, and the absence of any organised way for small savings and merry-go-round groups to get off the ground safely.
Those concerns became, almost directly, the foundation of our widows' support, mentorship and economic empowerment programmes. It remains the model we return to whenever considering new work: ask the community what's actually missing before assuming we know.