Winnie Otieno
Kenyan social entrepreneur Winnie Otieno has turned Mathare’s cramped alleys into a living case study in community-driven renewal. In 2017 she founded Women Action Foundation Kenya, then a one-room after-school club, after a neighbor’s daughter missed class for lack of a safe bathroom. Today the organization anchors Jangwani’s first ablution block with piped water, a 4,000-book library, and a solar-lit hall that doubles as a coding lab. Over 800 girls have passed through its mentorship and vocational training streams, emerging as seamstresses, electricians, and peer health educators. Since 2019 her workshops have cut reported water-borne illnesses by 40 percent in participating households and boosted school attendance among girls.
Otieno sits on Mathare’s settlement leadership committee, brokering land-use deals that swap idle lots for kitchen-garden collectives, and she lobbies city planners to extend sewer lines into informal estates. Her next mission is to replicate the sanitation-library-skills model across five Nairobi slums while launching a micro-grant fund for women-run waste-recycling startups. Grounded in the creed “dignity before charity,” she aims to prove that sustainable infrastructure and economic agency can bloom even where streets have no names.