Wanjiku Karanja
Wanjiku led FSD Kenya’s Savings and Credit Co-operative (SACCO) reforms project whose objective is to develop the capacities of the SACCO sub-sector to meet the requirements of the new regulatory framework. She worked closely with FSD Kenya’s Head of Poverty Impact, planning and implementation of other new and existing projects. Her other tasks alongside leading the management of activities of the SACCO reforms project includes; providing oversight and technical support to project partners in project implementation, project budget monitoring, procurement, contracting and payments.
Articles by Wanjiku Karanja:
July 17th, 2025
Rethinking resilience – Financing Kenya’s food systems in a fractured global economy
Jared Ochieng
May 27th, 2025
Traction and reversed gains: Financing smallholder dairy farmers through a tech – based real economy innovator.
Wanjiku Karanja
August 7th, 2024
The intrigues and dilemmas in delivering value adding financial solutions for dairy smallholder women farmers.
Wanjiku Karanja
March 8th, 2022
A new approach to women’s economic empowerment: FSD Kenya’s Marsabit Pilot
Wanza Mbole Namboya
In 2016 FSD Kenya branched outside our core financial inclusion remit to embark on a new pilot in Marsabit county where we sought to develop a more holistic approach to economic inclusion. The ambition was to deepen the value of finance in people’s lives, moving beyond financial access and use and investing in building capabilities and market linkages to enable finance to yield stronger impacts on livelihood resilience and growth. Our aim was to reach the extreme poor and especially women, who are not well served by the financial sector.
May 15th, 2019
Building livelihoods using inclusive finance for chicken farming
Wanza Mbole Namboya
FSD Kenya set out to explore ways of using finance to build livelihoods of poor households in Kitui. The survey identified indigenous poultry and pulses as the agriculture value chains with the greatest opportunity for low-income households.
April 25th, 2018
Tackling poverty in rural Kenya through community-owned village banks
Wanjiku Karanja
Why FSAs are the preferred financial service providers in Kitui.
The popularity of graduation programmes as the means to ending extreme poverty is growing globally.
April 11th, 2018
Light at the end of the tunnel: building livelihoods under tough conditions
Tamara Cook
“We have been working towards this moment for a long time. With the bank loans just a few weeks away we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Our first blog in this series discussed the Hunger Safety Net Programme and savings groups (SGs), for which we’ve also sought to use market based approaches. Part Two, discusses the use of a market based approach in graduation programmes.
For seven years, Najiri has received bi-monthly cash transfers from the Hunger Safety Net Programme (HSNP) a Kenyan government program in Northern Kenya
March 31st, 2017
Creating value through financial inclusion: the trust element
Mutua Mulanga
In an effort to understand the real needs of the people, our seventh ‘Field Friday’ exercise took us to Karagita in Naivasha. We set out to gather insights on which financial services people use and which ones they trust most.
Meet Najiri: One of the target recipients for FSD Kenya’s new graduation programme.
The sun is bright in Marsabit, the kind of bright that sears anything its rays touch. There isn’t much rain here, most parts of the county are arid.
