Since 2003, Kageno has grown from a grassroots effort initiated by a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer and a local Kenyan community organizer into an organization delivering community development projects in two countries, with over 600 employees and nearly 1000 volunteers.

In early 2002, the small village of Kolunga Beach on Rusinga Island in Kenya was in the midst of a crisis. The rate of HIV/AIDS among adults was over forty percent, and children orphaned by AIDS were searching for scraps to eat in piles of trash strewn with human feces. The unemployment rate was more than 80 percent, and at the lake edge, women bartered sex for fish from migrant fisherman, so that they could feed their families. The village’s main source of drinking water was Lake Victoria, which receives millions of liters of untreated sewage each day. The village had only one latrine per 1,200 individuals, and no means to safely deposit human waste. There was no trash removal program, and the village was naked of foliage, having been stripped by a population unable to afford any other form of cooking fuel.

Kageno’s first Innovative Community Center (ICC) was constructed for the pilot program at Kolunga Beach in 2003. The Center’s first programs taught empowering skills to exploited women and provided education and care to AIDS orphans. These were the first of many successful projects for the people of Kolunga Beach. In 2007, Kageno both expanded its operations to a second site on Mfangano Island in Kenya, and opened its newest site in Banda Village, Rwanda in 2007.
 For more on benchmarks and accomplishments of Kageno’s history to date, Click Here.