Hatua Network
Preparing Promising Youth to Thrive
Fast Facts
Kenya
Mike Fitzgerald
2024, 2025
Education
How Hatua Network Is Making a Difference
Hatua’s mission is to end generational poverty by preparing promising Kenyan youth from low-income families to build successful professional careers and thrive in Kenya’s modern economy.
Hatua provides youth with scholarships for quality high school and university education, workplace experience while in school, mentoring focused on job readiness and soft skills critical for career success, and links to professional networks.
Hatua also promotes gender equality, empowering young women to assert control over their bodies and futures, and creating lifelong changes in the ways boys and girls communicate and show respect for one another’s boundaries.
The Work of Hatua Network
- Trains students to serve as peer educators in primary and secondary schools during their gap year between high school and university.
- Supports Gap Year student mentors teaching entrepreneurship, financial literacy, computer skills, and civic education to high school students.
- Enables gap-year students, through its Life Skills Peer Education Program, to learn and teach the biology of reproduction, the consequences of teen pregnancy, and pregnancy prevention: how to say no, the importance of consent, and methods of contraception.
- Offers gap-year students its Skills for the Future training in communication, collaboration, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, and responsibility through interactive workshops, hands-on training, and implementation sessions.
Initiatives Supported by Project Redwood
2024: $40,000 to fund the two programs — Gap Year and Life Skills Peer Education — in which gap year students mentor high school students in business-related and life-skills-related materials.
2025: $30,000 to support the Skills for the Future project that provides a training program designed to equip high school scholars with critical soft skills and job readiness techniques. The project aims to create measurable improvements in employment rates and income levels by bridging the gap between education and employability.