Arnolda Shiundu
Kenyan sustainability architect Arnolda Shiundu has shown that a brewery can quench thirsts while healing its watershed. As head of Sustainability and Community Engagement at Kenya Breweries Limited, she rewired the brewer’s supply chain to source sorghum, barley, and cassava from 47,000 small-scale farmers, injecting millions of shillings into rural economies and shrinking the company’s carbon footprint. Her Water for Life programme piped clean water to more than 2.5 million people, while a million-tree reforestation drive restored riparian buffers and brewery fuel stocks alike, initiatives that earned KBL the 2020 SDGs Kenya Award for private-sector leadership.
Shiundu’s playbook fused profit with purpose: linking farmer finance to yield-improvement training, tying water stewardship to community health metrics, and benchmarking every project against the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Now consulting across East Africa, she is advising agri-processors on regenerative sourcing and piloting circular-economy partnerships that turn brewing waste into animal feed and bio-fertiliser. Her next target is to help create a pan-African sustainability index that rewards companies for measurable social and environmental impact, proof that, in the right hands, corporate strategy can pour opportunity as readily as it pours beer.