When Kennedy Odede got the call that his charity, Shining Hope for Communities, or Shofco, had won the $2 million Conrad N. Hilton Foundation Humanitarian Prize, he was speechless.
“I was like, ‘No, no way,” he recalled. “It’s too much.”
Odede started Shofco in 2004 in Kibera, the Nairobi, Kenya, slum where he grew up witnessing homelessness and abuse. Now his organization is the 23rd recipient of the prize, one of the largest humanitarian awards in the world.
“We are still trying to come to the fact that it’s real,” he said.
Shofco’s programs to provide clean water and improve health care, education, and economic empowerment for women and girls are led by the community. The organization now operates in six slums in Kenya and has reached more than 220,000 people by working with residents to assess needs.
Crime and the need for women’s empowerment have topped the list of issues in the slums, Odede said. Shofco has responded with projects including clean streets, arts programs, and schools, especially for girls.
Shofco will use the prize money, which is unrestricted, to create an endowment and expand into more areas of the world. Odede and his staff will start by advising communities in other countries that want to create similar organizations.
Odede hopes his group’s prize demonstrates that homegrown organizations can make big differences in communities.
“More than money, it’s time to start supporting grass-roots movements,” he said. “We are shifting from top-to-bottom to bottom-up.”
Attracting Funds
Peter Laugharn, president of the Hilton Foundation, hopes the prize money will preserve Shofco’s autonomy and help attract other investments.
“In our eyes, it’s a very resourceful, creative, dynamic organization that accomplishes things that the Kenyan government doesn’t think it could do in the areas of education, health, water, economic development,” Laugharn said.
The Hilton Foundation is one of the country’s largest private grant makers, with $2.8 billion in assets, according to a statement from the foundation.
The value of the humanitarian prize, which is selected by an independent jury, was initially $1 million but was raised to $1.5 million in 2005 and $2 million in 2015 to mark its 20th anniversary.
Laugharn said the amount may increase again as the foundation continues to grow.
Laugharn said Hilton is working on a fellowship program with past winners, which include BRAC and last year’s International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. In 2015, the foundation also announced it would spend an additional $2 million to facilitate collaboration and learning among its network of past prize winners.
“We are becoming a global voice for other people in the villages, in the slums,” Odede said. “Now they, too, can keep on pushing and come together and their voice will be heard.”
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly said that last year’s award recipient was the Task Force for Global Health instead of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research.
