By: Amber Cortes
Gilbert Kamanga. Photo ©2023 World Vision
Gilbert Kamanga, National Director for World Vision Kenya, has a lot to be grateful for. Born in a small village in Malawi, Kamanga grew up in a family of six. As he puts it, poverty was not a stranger in his community.
“But I thank God that through education, I was able to get some employment.”
With faith as his motivator, Kamanga pushed himself to achieve more. He studied at the University of Malawi and went on to earn his masters in Rural Social Development at the University of Reading.
Kamanga started his nearly 30 year journey at World Vision, a Christian humanitarian relief and development organization, by “growing within the ranks from a field officer to the executive level where I am now.”
Before becoming the National Director for Kenya, Kamanga was the National Director for Tanzania, Malawi, and Uganda. As the National Director, Kamanga ensures that the strategy for World Vision in Kenya is developed, financed and implemented effectively.
Photo ©2023 World Vision
“But the key to the role is to ensure that as World Vision will remain true to the cause,” says Kamanga. “When I see children from very humble families living a better life, this, to me, gives me hope.”
“And,” Kamanga adds, “the fact that World Vision does not just come and go in a community also gives me hope. Because we believe that development requires going alongside the people and takes long time. And to me, that’s what motivates me to keep going.”
For Kamanga, the issues closest to his heart are the empowerment and uplifting of women and children in communities.
“I started thinking a long time ago, if you want to change society today, in Africa or anywhere, it sounds like a cliché, but it’s not a cliché, it’s a reality: focus on women and children.”
Drawing from his own experience, Kamanga remembers how his mother worked hard to ensure the family had enough to eat.
Photo ©2023 World Vision
“I saw how we were six in our family, how we struggled to achieve a better life, but we had no guidance.”
So Kamanga wants to help provide this guidance by working with youth, who he points out will one day become parents to their own children as well.
As of 2022, around 40% of the population was aged 15 years and younger, and women make up 50% of the population in countries across the continent.
“To achieve a critical mass, work with women and youth, because if you have a critical mass, you cannot ignore what is in front of you.”
Throughout his long career at World Vision, one program stands out to Kamanga as a point of pride, and a goalpost for the future: THRIVE.
Developed by World Vision in 2013, the THRIVE program is aimed at building both improved and resilient livelihoods for smallholder farmers in different countries around the world.
Kamanga was there for the first large scale test model that launched in Tanzania and then expanded to Zambia, Malawi, Rwanda and Honduras. The program served about 375,000 people in about 75,000 smallholder farming families in those five countries.
Photo ©2023 World Vision
THRIVE is World Vision’s livelihoods model that uses a multifaceted approach, with a focus on shareholder farmer communities, to help families lift themselves out of poverty.
One area is the business aspect of farming, which includes for example, understanding markets, utilizing sustainable conservation methods, but even some ideas not directly related to farming, like organizing communities into savings groups.
The program also uses education to teach the natural resource management systems of farming, and develop situational awareness to prepare for environmental shocks like plant disease and climate change.
But the foundation of the program, according to Kamanga is the ‘empowered worldview’ pillar, a biblically-based approach that addresses the problem of disempowerment and fatalism by tackling the issue of personal “agency”: helping people understand that they do have the capacity to control their own lives. The curriculum also addresses stewarding natural resources, providing compassion to people within your own family and community, and envisioning a powerful future for yourself and your family.
“So unlocking the positive aspects of various components of their faith, was, for a lack of better term, the ‘secret sauce’ of THRIVE,” says Kamanga.
“Because we have seen that in Africa, where faith is a central part of daily life, when you start discussing with people issues of their faith, and how that relates to them, it gives them hope, because then they see who they are in the bigger scheme of things.”
Photo ©2023 World Vision
A recent evaluation conducted by TANGO International on THRIVE showed that over the course of the seven year study, THRIVE household annual incomes rose from $138 a year to $1,370 a year, and that “families used the money to improve their children’s education, housing improvements, medical care, and investments in their businesses.”
40% of families participating in THRIVE reported more food security, reporting that they could provide for the basic needs of all children in their families.
Now, World Vision is seeking to expand the THRIVE model to reach 10 million people in 11 countries by 2030. The focus is on helping the extreme poor—those who earn less than a dollar a day—rise up out of poverty and build improved and resilient livelihoods.
Kamanga and World Vision believe it is completely possible to end extreme poverty within our lifetime. In 1982, over 36% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, now, it’s 9% and falling.
Photo ©2023 World Vision
For Kamanga, the path to ending extreme poverty is shorter than we think. With 2 of every three people living in extreme poverty in the world today being smallholder farmers, the best question to ask is, “How do we help smallholder farmers make a lot more money in agriculture?” And it begins with faith, commitment, and collaboration.
“So what am I saying is that if we commit today, at an individual level, to contribute to ending extreme poverty, we will end it. Because we have the tools. We have the knowledge. We have the expertise to do it.”