Stanley | Kenya
A Young Boy Takes a Stand for His Family
Stanley grew up in a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi called Kawangware. His Mom was raising 7 children on her own, and Stanley was the second-eldest. “All of us lived in a single room. We were used to sleeping hungry. One time, we didn’t eat for an entire week. If you asked for the poorest family in this area, you’d be brought to our house. It was extreme,” he told us.
In high school, Stanley felt he needed to support the family – find a way to put food on the table, pay for his siblings’ school fees, and contribute to the rent. He began taking mjengo gigs—the local slang for pick-up construction work you can get by waiting at a site and seeing if you will be hired. It was heavy manual laboring from sun-up to sun-down, for which he was paid between $2-$3.50 USD. Still, he was able to keep his family from starving. “I needed to stand like a man,” he explained.
Generation Opens a Door to a New World
Stanley’s family caught a major break when he heard about Generation Kenya’s Financial Services program back in 2015. The program led to commission-based work selling insurance. In this line of work, learning a growth mindset was critical. Being able to face daily rejection, thriving under pressure, and still having the hustle to succeed was key. Stanley was a natural.
It wasn’t long before he became the top earner in his company and was promoted many times. Beyond the periphery of the slum he grew up in, he discovered a corporate world filled with opportunity, and the money continued increasing. Now he could support his family much more robustly, while setting aside savings to begin his own independent life.
A New Generation of Success is Born
Stanley met his wife in the Generation Kenya program. They had two children together, whose life bears little resemblance to their father’s childhood. “There’s a TV, there’s a laptop. There’s a car outside, and I carry them daily to school. They have to go to college! Be great people in this nation,” Stanley says.
Stanley shares that COVID brought some shake-ups to the insurance industry in Kenya. He decided to leave that industry, and parlayed his customer service skills to work briefly in catering until he landed in an entrepreneurial role in the transportation industry. Today, he uses the same sales and customer service (not to mention growth mindset!) skills he learned ten years ago from Generation, and is quite successful. Stanley’s ability to move across industries with the skills and mindset he learned ten years ago, demonstrates a core facet of how Generation’s programs are built to help learners navigate change and succeed over the course of a lifetime.
“To this day, I eat thanks to Generation, I pay my children’s school fees thanks to Generation, I pay my rent thanks to Generation. If it weren’t for Generation, I don’t know where I would be. But because of Generation, I have a story to tell. Generation played a very crucial role in my life!”
