Year one
The plan, the governance, and the things that could go wrong
Twelve months, one community, one programme. Published in full — including the risk register, which most organisations keep in a drawer.
Roadmap
Twelve months, in order
- Confirm the specific Mombasa ward or community
- Recruit to the 10-member CBO threshold with genuinely invested local members — not names collected to clear a legal requirement
- Register the CBO with Mombasa County's Public Service Administration, Youth, Gender & Sports department
- Open contact with Coast Women in Development and the Pwani GBV Network as a future specialised partner
- Adopt the safeguarding, child protection and complaints policies before any participant contact
- Run a genuine listening process with girls and young women in the target community
- Sign formal referral MOUs with Mombasa GBVRC (medical and psychosocial) and FIDA Kenya (legal aid)
- Open a dedicated organisational bank account in the CBO's name, with two signatories
- Design the combined pilot — savings group, gender-transformative curriculum, and one concrete alternative-income pathway
- Scope to one or two groups of 15–25 girls and young women
- Secure apprenticeship or placement commitments from Mombasa employers before the training starts, not after
- Apply to the African Women's Development Fund Small Grants Programme
- Apply to Urgent Action Fund–Africa
- Approach Kenyan corporate CSR partners with a coastal presence
- Track and respond to the UNFPA 2026 East and Southern Africa call
- Run and monitor the pilot, documenting outcomes honestly — including what does not work
- Publish a first annual report and financial summary
- Begin national PBO registration in parallel, once a funding relationship is secured
Governance
How we are registering, and why
Kenya's nonprofit regulatory framework changed substantially between 2024 and 2026 and parts of it remain contested in court. We engage qualified Kenyan legal counsel ahead of each registration milestone rather than relying on template documents.
| Structure | Decision | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Community-Based Organisation Community Group Registration Act, 2022 | Chosen — Year One | County-level registration through Mombasa County. Roughly KES 1,000–5,000, typically completed in about five working days, minimum ten resident members. Proportionate to what we are actually doing in Year One. |
| Public Benefit Organisation Kenya's post-2024 successor to the NGO framework | Planned — 12 to 18 months | Regulated by the PBO Regulatory Authority. Roughly KES 25,000 plus a KES 1,000 name reservation, typically 3–5 months in practice. We register once programme results, a functioning board and at least one funding relationship exist — not before. |
| Society | Ruled out | Simplest to register, but has no separate legal personality: it cannot own property, sign contracts, or hold a bank account in its own name. Unworkable for an organisation that needs to receive grants. |
| Trust | Ruled out | Designed for holding and managing assets — an endowment, land, a scholarship fund — rather than running an active service programme. |
| Company Limited by Guarantee | Held open | Remains a future option if earned income becomes a deliberate, central part of our funding model. The 2026 PBO Regulations now also permit PBOs to run income-generating activities and reinvest the proceeds, which narrows that advantage. |
As of this writing, only around 8,458 of an estimated 14,700 existing Public Benefit Organisations had completed Kenya's 2026 compliance transition, with default notices in circulation and litigation over parts of the framework unresolved. We are entering this environment with our eyes open, and we would rather a funder read that here than discover it later.
Partnerships
Where we sit in Mombasa's existing infrastructure
We do not build parallel crisis-response capacity. We refer into it, under formal agreement.
Coast Women in Development & the Pwani GBV Network
Network membership — soughtEstablished in 2005, CWID serves as secretariat of the Pwani GBV Network, the coordinating body for organisations addressing gender-based violence across coastal Kenya. We intend to engage early as a specialised member, contributing our prevention-focused programme to the network rather than duplicating its coordination role.
Mombasa GBV Recovery Centre
Referral MOU — planned, months 1–3Based at Coast General Hospital. Our referral partner for medical and psychosocial needs that reach crisis level, beyond our programme's scope.
FIDA Kenya
Referral MOU — planned, months 1–3Our referral partner for legal aid and access-to-justice needs.
Mombasa County Government
Coordination, not fundingWe engage the Youth, Gender & Sports department and the existing Tononoka GBV Situation Room for coordination, referrals and legitimacy. We deliberately treat this as a coordination relationship rather than a funding source: the department's own budget execution has run at 23.5% of plan in the most recent reporting period, and building a funding model on that would be irresponsible.
Risk register
Six things that could go wrong, and what we do about each
Published deliberately. A new organisation that cannot name its own failure modes has not thought hard enough about them.
Ten interconnected issue areas and a seven-part programme model are a decade-two ambition, not a Year One deliverable.
A single programme focus in Year One — the combined GBV and economic-empowerment model — expanding deliberately from there.
COVAW and CREAW nationally, and CWID and the Pwani GBV Network on the coast, hold decades of donor trust and infrastructure a new organisation cannot immediately match.
We position ourselves as a specialised partner inside the existing network rather than a rival to it.
A genuine asset that carries a specific failure mode: a founder's or staff member's own boundaries treated as less important than participants'.
Structured supervision and peer support for all staff in direct programme delivery from day one, as standard practice rather than a special accommodation.
Shelters, hotlines and emergency intervention carry safety, legal and psychosocial obligations a new, unfunded organisation is not equipped to carry safely.
We build no parallel crisis infrastructure. We maintain formal referral partnerships for anything reaching crisis level.
Kenya's nonprofit regulatory environment is in active transition, with default notices and unresolved litigation part of the current landscape.
Qualified legal counsel engaged ahead of each registration milestone rather than reliance on template documentation.
Especially likely in mission-driven organisations built around an expansive long-term vision.
A disciplined Year One scope is treated as protecting the team, not only the funding case.
Full document
The complete strategic plan
Nine pages, thirty-one sources, prepared August 2026.
Request the full strategic plan