Our Founder

Jackie Odhiambo

My father died when I was 11 years old, and from then on I was raised by team of widows: my widowed mother, Rebecca, my widowed aunt, Peninah, and my widowed grandmother, Wilikister. In childhood, I saw how loneliness and financial hardships affected these women. I was also inspired by the sacrifices each of them made for us as children, and the resilience they demonstrated amidst adversity. In particular, my mother instilled in my the value of education, arguing it was my pathway out of poverty to dignity, freedom and flourishing.

When I set off on a full scholarship to Williams College in the USA, through mentorship from Zawadi Africa, I had one mission at heart - to make her mother proud. From Williams, I joined the Global Health Research Core at Harvard Medical School to support research capacity-building initiatives at Partners In Health. I worked in Rwanda and Boston for three years, and supported 38 Rwandese health professionals in developing and publishing 20 research papers. After my time in Rwanda, I completed my MSc with distinction in International Public Health - Planning and Management at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool UK. From the UK, I came back to Kenya in 2019 to officially begin my work with widows.

I had began working with widows in 2017 after seeing the mistreatments widows experienced in community projects we had initiated. By then, my friends and I had helped start Mboto Sunrise Primary School as the first school in my village, which is currently a government school that serves over 300 students. We had also partnered with Kenya Water for Health Organization and my community to drill a community borehole that serves over 3000 households and the school. These projects improved access to basic education and clean and safe water in my community. These community projects also opened my eyes to the societal plight of widowed women. I was disheartened to see that when widows spoke, no one listened and when something went wrong with these projects, widows were the first blame. Around this time, one widow started reaching out to me repeatedly, asking for suppport. When we invited this widow and a few of her widowed friends for a conversation to explore their needs and goals, we were surprised when 80 widows showed up. This initial conversation inspired us to start a journey with widows that culminated to registration of Nyanam in 2019, and the ongoing work to help widows reclaim their dignity and thrive within their communities.

I am currently a PhD student and fellow in the Sustainable Development for HIV Health project co-implemented by University of California San Francisco USA and Maseno University in Western Kenya. I spent 2021-2022 completing advanced training in Epidemiology and Biostatics at UCSF while developing my research proposal. My PhD research project explores the stigma of widowhood, aiming to systematically characterizing this experience from widows’ perspectives, explore how this stigma impacts health, and provide baseline information that can help in the design of self and societal stigma reduction interventions and policies. Through my research, I have discovered the extensive scope and burden of widowhood stigma across sub-Saharan Africa, and its detrimental impact on widows’ social, physcosocial , and economic wellbeing. My vision is for Africa where widows thrive. I hope that my research and implementation work at Nyanam will continue to grow to realize this vision. I am delighted to work with widows and grateful for all friends and organizations that support this work.