Maryana Munyendo
Maryana Munyendo is a Kenyan child-safety advocate and social entrepreneur building digital lifelines for missing children. In 2016 she founded Missing Child Kenya, a crowdsourced alert network that pushes photographs and descriptions through SMS, social media, radio, and highway billboards within minutes of a disappearance. Partnering with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, telecom operators, and ride-hailing firms, the platform has handled 1,430 cases and safely reunited 1,090 children by July 2025, achieving a 76 percent recovery rate and cutting average search time to forty-eight hours.
To prevent abductions, Munyendo created Simba-Safe Kenya, an age-appropriate curriculum that teaches body autonomy, safe commuting, and responsible internet use. The programme has trained 55,000 pupils and 4,200 teachers in eleven counties and now offers an interactive e-learning module funded by the Safaricom Digischool Fund.
Munyendo is a 2021 Meta Community Accelerator alumna and received a Presidential Head of State Commendation in 2023 for her contribution to child protection. She sits on the advisory board of the Africa Missing Children Network and consults for UNICEF on technology-enabled family-tracing systems. Off duty she mentors youth coders at AkiraChix and photographs Kenya’s scenic Rift Valley landscapes, believing every child deserves to grow up safely, healthy, happy lives.
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