UN in Kenya

UN in Kenya Led by UN Resident Coordinator Dr Garry Conille.
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The UN in Kenya brings agencies together to support the Government and partners in advancing Kenya’s national development priorities, delivering SDG results and ensuring no one is left behind.

14/08/2026

The best solutions to Kenyan problems are often Kenyan. This is one of them.

A green-technology innovation, designed and run here, is solving a real local problem rather than importing an answer built for somewhere else. Backed well, this kind of work does two things at once: it addresses an environmental or economic challenge, and it builds skills and income in Kenya.

The test, as ever, is durability. Innovation that survives only as long as the programme funding it is not yet innovation. The aim is for ideas like this to stand on their own, in Kenyan markets and Kenyan systems. That is what turns a pilot into progress.

12/08/2026

Different contexts, common aspirations.

Young people may be growing up, studying and working in very different circumstances, but many share common aspirations: opportunity, decent work and a meaningful voice in the decisions that affect their lives.

This International Youth Day, we celebrate the contribution young people are already making to Kenya’s development.

UN Kenya, through UNOPS, is helping create spaces for young people to bring their ideas, perspectives and leadership into the workplace and into conversations on sustainable development.

In this video, young colleagues at UNOPS in Kenya take us through an ordinary working day: collaborating, brainstorming, solving problems and contributing their perspectives. Through initiatives such as the UNOPS Youth Engagement Platform, young people also have opportunities to contribute to wider discussions and decision-making.

Young people are not only preparing to shape the future. They are helping shape Kenya today.

Peace deals signed at the top tend to fade. The ones communities build for themselves tend to hold.That is the logic beh...
12/08/2026

Peace deals signed at the top tend to fade. The ones communities build for themselves tend to hold.

That is the logic behind locally led peacebuilding: supporting communities to resolve their own disputes, over land, water, grazing or old grievances, rather than imposing a settlement from outside. It is slower. It is also more durable, because the people who made the agreement are the people who keep it.

In a pre-electoral period, this quiet work matters more, not less. Early investment in trust, inclusion and dialogue is what keeps tension from hardening into something worse. It rarely makes the news, which is rather the point.

Read more: https://kenya.un.org/en/312748-un-kenya-2025-annual-results-report

Reforming the laws that govern women's security and property is slow, unglamorous work. In 2025, several pieces moved.Re...
11/08/2026

Reforming the laws that govern women's security and property is slow, unglamorous work. In 2025, several pieces moved.

Reform of the Matrimonial Property Act and related laws changed what security can mean for a woman: rights to property, protection in marriage, recourse when things go wrong. Ministries also began building gender- and disability-disaggregated data into how they plan and budget, because what gets counted gets funded.

None of this makes headlines on its own. Together it resets the baseline. Rights that exist on paper start to exist in practice when the law, the data and the people pushing for change line up.

That is what happened, quietly, in 2025.

Explore more: https://kenya.un.org/en/312751-un-kenya-2025-annual-results-report

Doris Obondo looked at what coffee processing throws away and saw a business.For decades, Kenya has exported coffee bean...
10/08/2026

Doris Obondo looked at what coffee processing throws away and saw a business.

For decades, Kenya has exported coffee beans and imported coffee culture. The value, the brand and the premium accrued somewhere else. Doris founded Reground Beauty to change that in a small way, turning coffee by-products into something with value.

Her business sits inside a wider Joint Programme building circular-economy value chains in Kenya: supporting domestic value addition, local consumption and access to finance for rural coffee entrepreneurs. The idea is simple. Keep more of what Kenyan coffee is worth in Kenyan hands.

This is what 'youth and opportunity' looks like when it is real and not a slogan.

Across Kenya, the same pattern keeps showing up.Where the county leads, communities do the work and partners support wit...
09/08/2026

Across Kenya, the same pattern keeps showing up.

Where the county leads, communities do the work and partners support without taking over, the result tends to stick. That is devolution doing what it was meant to do, and it is where the next phase of this work should focus.

From the drylands to the lakeside, county leadership is turning national priorities into things people can actually see and use: water that flows, clinics that reach girls, cooperatives that pay, courts that move. The job now is to keep what works and carry the lessons into the next framework.

Find out more:https://kenya.un.org/en/stories

The SDGs can feel like something that happens in conference rooms. In the counties they look like ordinary things workin...
08/08/2026

The SDGs can feel like something that happens in conference rooms. In the counties they look like ordinary things working.

A court that hears a case before a business collapses. A law that finally protects a woman's property. A clinic that reaches the girls hardest to reach. None of these are headline-grabbing on their own.

Together they are what Goal 16, peace, justice and strong institutions, actually means in Kenya.

The point of the SDGs was never the numbering. It was that progress on one depends on progress on the others, in real places. That is what this county series has been showing all week.

Michael Ndurumo lost his hearing at the age of eight, after contracting meningitis. At the time, Kenya had no establishe...
07/08/2026

Michael Ndurumo lost his hearing at the age of eight, after contracting meningitis. At the time, Kenya had no established sign language, no framework for educating deaf children and no institution dedicated to either.

He went to study in the United States. When he came back, he built what had not existed. He led the development of Kenyan Sign Language, now one of Kenya's three national languages.

He founded the Africa Institute of Deaf Studies and Research. He became Kenya's first deaf professor. And he spent decades arguing that persons with disabilities are not recipients of development, but its architects.

In 2025, Kenya named him UN Kenya Person of the Year. Recognition for a lifetime of turning silence into language.

Read more: https://kenya.un.org/en/304578-professor-michael-ndurumo-named-2025-united-nations-kenya-person-year

Disability inclusion in Kenya is moving from goodwill to rules, and that is the change that lasts.Ruth Osebe's work on d...
06/08/2026

Disability inclusion in Kenya is moving from goodwill to rules, and that is the change that lasts.

Ruth Osebe's work on disability-inclusive procurement means public buying has to consider accessibility from the start, not as an afterthought once a building or a service is already built.

In 2025, Kenya also completed a feasibility study for a Universal Disability Benefit, the analytical groundwork for a more systematic approach.

The shift that matters is from optional consideration to mandatory costing. When inclusion has to be planned and budgeted for, it stops depending on whether someone in the room happens to care. It becomes how things are done.

This is rights and systems, not charity.

Read the full story at: https://kenya.un.org/en/311511-timid-entrepreneur-mentor-ruth-osebe-michoma-helps-women-disabilities-enter-procurement

05/08/2026

For years, Kenya's safety nets did not talk to each other.

One programme ran from one department, another from a county office, a third from a partner. A family could qualify for one and miss another for reasons that were purely administrative, not about need. When drought hit a place like Mandera, families like Dahira's could fall straight through the gaps.

The Social Protection Act 2025 was designed to end that. For the first time it sets a single national framework, so support can follow the household. Refugees in Kakuma and Dadaab were brought into the national registry too.

The law does not fix funding gaps overnight. What it does is replace a patchwork with an architecture. Led by Kenya, supported by the UN.

Full story at kenya.un.org.

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