Nairobi's Passion to Share Foundation is empowering young mothers and girls who dropped out of school to build their own futures, teaching them the skills they need to start businesses and support themselves and their families.
In the centre of Nairobi, where corrugated iron roofs shimmer under the afternoon sun and narrow footpaths weave through tightly packed homes, lives 23-year-old Sharon Achieng. Although there was a time when she thought she'd merely survive, rather than live.
She grew up in Kibera, one of the biggest slum towns on the African continent. Her mother sold vegetables by the roadside, while her father drifted in and out of casual jobs.
Sharon loved school – the order of writing in notebooks and the certainty of exams – but when she became pregnant at the age of 16, all that changed. Her classmates whispered, and teachers avoided making eye contact with her. Eventually, she stopped going to school.
“I felt like the world had decided my story,” Sharon says. “Teen mother. Failure. Finished.”
For months after her son Brian was born, she rarely left the house. With no income, no diploma and no plan, the weight of the responsibility pressed on her. What frightened her most was not poverty, it was the fear that nothing would ever change.
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Training over charity
Then a neighbour told her about a small organisation based nearby called the Passion to Share Foundation, which offers training for young mothers and girls who have dropped out of school.
Sharon was hesitant, having heard promises of help before. But then, walking through the gates of the organisation's offices one Monday morning with Brian strapped to her back, she met founder Lydia Anyango.
She too, years earlier, had had to rely on sponsorship to complete her education and understood the humiliation women can feel when they need to ask for help.
“When I started Passion to Share, I didn’t want charity,” Lydia explains. “I wanted transformation. I wanted girls to discover what they are capable of.”
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Founded in 2017, the organisation started life with little more than borrowed space and borrowed hope.
Lydia’s vision was simple: equip disadvantaged girls and young mothers with the practical skills that will allow them to earn an income – including fashion design, computer graphics and beauty therapy. She believes poverty is not just about lack of money, but lack of options.
Sharon enrolled in the fashion design programme, learning to measure fabric, cut clean lines and operate an industrial sewing machine.
She recalls that she felt overwhelmed, starting something new. But, surrounded by other young women with similar stories of young motherhood and dropping out of school, she no longer felt like an outsider.
Business loans
The Foundation also anticipates one of the biggest barriers young mothers face: childcare. Through its day care programme, infants as young as four months are supervised while their mothers attend training.
Knowing that Brian was being looked after left Sharon free to focus on the new skills she was acquiring as the months passed.
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As her confidence grew, she began designing dresses for her neighbours. Then she received her first paid order: matching outfits for a local church choir. She worked late into the night, stitching under a single bulb.
When the choir members appeared on in her creations, there was applause from the congregation. Sharon says it was the first time she had felt seen not for her circumstances, but for her skills.
The Foundation has launched a savings plan and an interest-free loan initiative to help graduates start micro-businesses – among them a roadside salon and a tailoring kiosk. Another graduate is now teaching digital design to secondary school students. Their successes have allowed them to not only pay their rent and buy textbooks for their children, but to shift the dynamics of their families.
'Passion is persistence'
Sharon used the loan facility to buy her own sewing machine, which has allowed her to turn her skills into her livelihood.
Today, she runs a small but growing tailoring business from a rented stall. Brian, now six, wears school uniforms that his mother made.
But when asked what changed her life, she doesn't mention the loan or the sewing machine: she says it was the belief that Lydia and Passion to Share showed in her.
“They looked at me and saw potential,” she says. “Before that, I only saw my mistake.”
Lydia tells her students that passion is not just excitement, it's persistence – choosing to show up every day, even when resources are limited and outcomes uncertain.
In a community where challenges include unemployment, teenage pregnancy and limited access to education, Passion to Share does not claim to be able to solve every problem, but rather offers its service users what they need to carve out their own path.
On one recent afternoon, Sharon returned to the Foundation as a guest speaker for a new group of young mothers.
“I thought my story ended at 16,” she told them. “But it was just a different beginning.”
