My Personal Journey with Africa
When I founded Kapes, a sustainable school uniform company, my mission was to prove that business could be a genuine force for good. At the start our work was simple, to create uniforms that had a lower impact on the planet and empowered students to be more conscious consumers. Over time this mission grew. Through our work in Africa, particularly in Kenya, I began to understand what real impact looks like when education, community, and opportunity come together.
Through Kapes, we have partnered with schools to provide almost 4000 free uniforms for children in need in Kenya and Togo.
While doing this, it became apparent that the children who could not afford a uniform could not afford to eat, which led me to launching school trips to Kenya to support nutrition and education.
Although I had visited Africa several times before starting Kapes, these experiences have broadened my view of both the challenges and the immense opportunities across the continent and have qualified me to speak not as a distant observer but as someone who has worked side by side with communities. They have also shown me how dangerous false narratives about Africa can be.
Challenging the Narrative
There are still people who think Africa is a single country rather than a continent made up of 56 nations, each with its own history, languages, and culture. The dominant story told about Africa is one of poverty, instability, and need.
I have seen the damage this does. I have seen well-meaning volunteers arrive and describe villages as “slums.” That word strips dignity from entire communities. These are not slums. They are places with names and identities; places people call home. When outsiders reduce them to slums while building their own brand as helpers, it becomes exploitation dressed up as charity.
The reality is that Africa is not poor. It is rich in talent, rich in resources, and rich in resilience. What is missing is opportunity.
And that absence of opportunity is not accidental. For centuries colonial powers extracted wealth and resources, leaving systems designed to keep people dependent. Even today structural problems remain. Political instability, corruption, and disputes over land still block progress.
At the same time, the continent has enormous strengths. Africa is home to the youngest population in the world. It has a rapidly expanding middle class and the richest mineral resources on earth. Potential is everywhere.
Consider a boy I met today in Kenya, just eleven years old, who was invited to compete in an international chess competition in Switzerland. His school owned only two chessboards, yet his talent shone bright enough to gain global recognition. His family and his school could not afford the airfare. Talent was there. Opportunity was not.
In another case, I visited a school in Rongai County, Nairobi. The school had 4,000 students. More than 2,500 of them could not afford a daily meal. Yet the school sat on 24 acres of unused land. I proposed to fully fund a farm that could feed the students for life. The idea was blocked because of a land dispute. Resources were available but systemic barriers stopped progress.
These are not isolated stories. They are symptoms of a broader pattern. They demonstrate why the narrative of a helpless continent waiting to be saved is not only wrong but harmful.
Reframing Africa as the Future
I recently came across a quote that struck me deeply: “Maybe, if life was fair, you would be worse off?” If you are reading this, chances are you were not born into poverty.
In parts of rural Kenya that I have visited, a farmer’s wage in a good year averages 41 dollars per month. In a drought year, which is becoming more common, that income drops to just 20.50 dollars.
Ironically, these droughts appear to be made worse by climate change, which these farmers barely contribute to, yet I’ve never heard anyone that I have met in Africa bemoan that life isn’t fair.
Africa does not need saving. What it needs is opportunity. It needs investment. It needs education systems that unlock potential. It needs partnerships that respect communities and create dignity, rather than pity or dependency.
Through Kapes we have shown that business can be part of the solution. Every uniform we sell funds free uniforms for children in Africa, and through our trips we are not only changing the narrative in the minds of those students that we bring to Kenya but are helping to develop community led systems that thrive once we are gone. We are not providing charity. We are building opportunity.
If we can change the way we speak about Africa, we can change the way the world engages with it. We must stop flattening Africa into a single story of poverty. We must recognise it as the youngest and most resource-rich continent on the planet.
Africa is not the past. It is the future, and I believe it will rise. The only question is whether you will play a part.
