Episode Notes:
In this week’s episode, we travel to Nairobi to speak with Tom Osborn, a visionary social entrepreneur and community-rooted leader whose work is reshaping how we think about mental health, sustainability, and youth empowerment in Africa. From growing up in a rural Kenyan village to launching his first clean energy venture at 18 and studying at Harvard, Tom’s path has been guided by a radical belief in community-first solutions and local agency. Now the founder and CEO of Shamiri Institute, Africa’s largest youth mental health provider, Tom shares how culturally grounded care, deep listening, and collective healing can transform not just individual lives but entire systems. Co-host Elisabeth Makumbi leads this beautiful conversation, which explores how to decolonize mental health care, reframe recovery on community terms, and rethink what it means to lead with humility, courage, and local knowledge.
Jump To:
03:30 – Listen to Tom read from his book, explaining the origins of his very un-Kenyan sounding name.
04:50 – Learn about the community in rural Kenya where Tom was raised and which supported and enabled his journey.
08:30 – On his first steps as a climate-focused entrepreneur being driven by a desire to solve a very personal problem—the health of his mother.
11:30 – The journey to Harvard.
12:20 – Understanding race and Blackness in an American context.
18:00 – Tom’s introduction to psychology and his pivot from climate solutions to innovating in the mental health space.
22:00 – On how the violence of colonization has left mental health care across Africa stigmatized and how instead solutions on the continent must be deeply rooted in community and care.
24:30 – “The way we think about mental health, which is 100% American-centric, is wrong.” Tom talks about with the Shamari Institute of building something new from scratch for Africans by Africans.
28:00 – Tapping into the power of community.
43:20 – On the new generation of African innovators.
Episode Transcript:
Darren Isom:
Welcome to Dreaming in Color, a space for social change leaders of color to reflect on how their unique life experiences, personal and professional, can prepare them to lead and drive the impact we all seek. I'm your host, Darren Isom.
This season, we're traveling to the continent to highlight African leaders and the continent's role as a key driver of global innovation and leadership. So join us as we travel across the continent, from South Africa to Tunisia, with stops in Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Senegal along the way, celebrating the diaspora and all of its complexity and beautiful possibility. This is Dreaming in Color: Africa.
In this season, I'm lucky to have my Bridgespan colleague, Elisabeth Makumbi, joining me as a guest co-host. Elisabeth is a social impact consultant and manager with Bridgespan Africa, based in our Joburg office. With a background in law and a career rooted in systems change, she brings a sharp strategic lens to some of the world's most complex challenges, from climate resilience, to global access to water, and sustainable finance. Prior to joining Bridgespan, she worked at Pegasus Consulting, focusing on climate change and sustainable development across the continent. Elisabeth holds an LLM from Georgetown University, a certificate in systems change in social impact from the UCT Graduate School of Business, and an LLB from the University of Pretoria.
A Pan-African at heart, born in Zimbabwe with Ugandan and Kenyan heritage, she channels her expertise into supporting NGOs like the Greater Cape Water Fund and Core Africa, strengthening their governance and impact. At her core, she's a purpose-driven advisor, committed to building a more just and sustainable world, and it's a joy to have Elisabeth host today's conversation in Nairobi's beautiful Africa House with the wonderfully brilliant Tom Osborn. Welcome to Dreaming in Color, Elisabeth.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Thanks, Darren. Today's guest is Tom Osborn, a bold thinker, systems innovator, and community-rooted social entrepreneur. Born and raised in Kenya to sugarcane farmers, Tom's journey has taken them from rural Kenya to Harvard and from local challenges to global recognition. At just 18, he co-founded Greenchar, a clean energy company that brought affordable cooking fuel to underserved communities, earning him a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30, and a distinction of being the youngest Echoing Green fellow.
Today, Thomas, founder and CEO of Shamiri Institute, Africa's largest youth mental health provider. Using evidence-based culturally grounded approaches to mental health, his work bridges global research and local knowledge, reaching over 100,000 young people across Africa with care that is accessible, affordable, and deeply resonant. Widely recognized for his leadership and social innovation, community building and entrepreneurship, Thomas is also the author of What We Can't Burn, A Memoir on Friendship, Friction and Global Energy Transition. Please join me in welcoming the wonderful Tom Osborn to this episode of Dreaming in Color.
Hi, Tom.
Tom Osborn:
Hey, how are you doing?
Elisabeth Makumbi:
I'm doing very well. How are you?
Tom Osborn:
I'm great. Just excited for this conversation.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Excellent. And we would love to start this conversation with an invocation, an invitation, if you will, to ground the conversation. And it can be anything from a verse or a song, something that hums to you but will resonate with others. What is yours today, Tom?
Tom Osborn:
So I'm reading from actually a book that I wrote. It's going to read one paragraph. "I was born on a sugarcane farm in the heart of a rural Kenyan village called Nyabera. I was born on an early Sunday morning in June. Ordinarily, they'll have named me Omondi. He was born in the morning. But instead my dad gave me two white names, Tom Osborn."
Elisabeth Makumbi:
That is perfect and actually leads us quite nicely into our first question for you, which is we also found out that you were born in rural Kenya to the son of two sugarcane farmers. And for many where you grew up, how you were raised, and our family and community really often lay the foundation of our values. So Tom, tell us a bit about how your upbringing shaped your worldview and what some of the core principles or lessons you learned growing up continue to guide and shape your work today.
Tom Osborn:
Yeah, so I have three siblings. We are all three years apart from each other because our parents didn't want to pay for college fees for more than one person at the same time.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
I get that.
Tom Osborn:
Which is great family planning. So being raised in a small rural community, it's a pretty communal upbringing. So you yes, belong to your nucleus family, but you're pretty much seen as a kid who belongs to the whole community. And so for me that was really important because there are important decisions that my small rural community made that affected me personally, which kind of have oriented me towards these community fast lands that I do tag to a lot of the work that I do.
And the first was when I was, I think about four or five years old, they realized that we had one school in the village and they realized that that school wasn't going to be good enough to match my academic aspirations. And so they did, we call it harambee, but it's just basically fundraising as a village and I was moved into staying initially briefly with my uncle who was a teacher in a small town nearby to get a better education outside of what is available in the village.
The second thing from this upbringing was just how difficult it is for young people, especially in this type of context, to be able to actualize your life potential. So when I grew up, we had this thing called an age group. An age group is about the people who are born around the same year. So traditionally, you'll go through life together, get married around the same time, et cetera. But in my age group, there were about 12 of us and only two of us will go through to high school and I'll be the only one who will graduate from college, for me something which really is profound because I don't see myself as being better or more talented, et cetera. It's just like the different type of decisions that the community made at different type of points allowed me to have opportunities that people didn't have.
And so basically from my upbringing, the two things which kind of stand with me, one is adopting kind of a community-fast approach to a lot of initiatives that I'm doing. Just this idea of agency and trying to expand the pool of opportunities that people have access to so that they can be agents who can actualize their life dreams and potential, however defined.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
I love that. And one of the through lines for our discussions today will be that, around that community first. But before we jump into that, just sticking a bit with the broader scheme about you often talk about social issues and which can often be said as being quite broad and abstract, but I really appreciate how you've been able to anchor it in your lived human experiences. And showing something as vast and systemic as climate change can actually have an immediate and personal impact on individual lives. So just branching off from what you've said, what experiences in your own life first revealed that connection between the personal and systemic to you?
Tom Osborn:
Well, a lot of the social issues that I have been thinking about, they normally begin from a personal connection. So for example, I spent my earlier time as an entrepreneur working on a clean energy venture, but I was doing it mostly because of the story of my mom. So growing up in rural Kenya, we primarily used firewood as a primary source of cooking, and this leads to a lot of respiratory tract infections, especially affecting women. And I think at that point, this was 10 years ago, about 3 million women around the world are suffering from this type of respiratory tract infection.
So my mom was one of them. So when I was in high school, she had this really bad respiratory tract illnesses, and I felt that I needed to do something to solve that problem for her initially and then more broadly for the other women. And so that's what brought me to this conversation. And so as I started thinking about how can we design clean cooking fuel, then I realized there's also a climate and energy transition part around this. And at that point, and still up to date, sometimes brings a form of tension, especially just to use the climate space as an example between folks who are coming at it from a purely climate perspectives, thinking more about CO2 emissions and how do we do this energy transition?
And I do find this often removes the lived experience of people who actually really go through it and turns it into super kind of abstract issues. And so just basically grounding these social issues on people is kind of a framework which I find to be really powerful. I think also, which makes most sense in our African context because we are mostly a people of community first and it's easier to direct resources and attention around issues like helping moms. Like my mom move from charcoal and firewood to cleaner fuels than reducing our carbon emissions as a country for example.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
So as someone with a climate background, I've spent the last seven years in climate change and I desperately fall into bucket number one, which is I just get caught up in the verbose terms that we use and just often struggle to think about how climate change is actually about people and livelihoods at the center of all of it. So just hearing you talk about that also just makes me realize how much I need to also internalize how I also position climate change and what it actually means in terms of my job.
But as we journey on in this conversation, one of the things we picked up is that you traveled from rural Kenya to Harvard. And that's just not a story of academic achievement, but also one of identity and belonging. So how did you navigate these different worlds and how did they shape your sense of purpose and influence your decision to return home to Kenya? But while you niggle on that, what does it also mean to you to create impact from within rather than from afar?
Tom Osborn:
Well, okay, that's a big one. So when I was 14, we did this national end of primary school exam, which everyone does in Kenya. And the way it works, I normally tell my American friends it's almost like a draft. So you do the exam and then the schools are ranked. And so the first ranked school has a fast choice of kids from around the country.
And I'd wanted to go to this school called Starehe, which is a school in Nairobi. And primarily the reason I wanted to go to the school, it was explicitly set up for kids from low income backgrounds in communities who cared about changing the world. But that year, Starehe was ranked third. So the first ranked school was called Alliance, and so they admitted me. And I didn't want to go to this school Alliance because it's historically known in Kenya to produce... If there's a corruption scandal or something bad which is happening in the country, there will be someone from Alliance-
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Points there.
Tom Osborn:
You know? Anyways, I went to that school and that's where I first had my identity conversation. So two things. One is [inaudible 00:12:13] my first time out of the village to Nairobi and everyone thought I was a white kid because of my white names. And so obviously when I showed up, they're all really disappointed. When I showed up, some like random kid from the village with the thick [inaudible 00:12:30] accent is not kind of what they had in their mind. But the school made me realize that my... So basically because everyone in the school was smart. So in the first exam I think I was ranked 70th, which was kind of a big shock to my system. But over time, I just realized that yes, I was academically gifted, but I wasn't going to be the most academically gifted person. And where I had an initial role to play will be in working with people who are smart and more talented than me and getting them to do things in the real world.
And I had this great opportunity to go to Harvard for undergrad, which was really difficult I think from a culture shock perspective. So moving from Kenya to America, trying to find a place where I fit within. For example, it's the first time I think about race. Being a Kenyan, you never really think about race. Then I was in the US, now I have to think about race. And then also realizing within the Black community, there's also segments and interpolitics between these kind of different segments. And starting to figure out what is my post-college pathway. And I always knew I was going to come back to Kenya, but it was reinforced by, every time I came back home, the way I explain it to folks here is if you're going to CBD in Nairobi, most likely you're not going to get robbed, but you have a sixth sense that you're going to get robbed so you're just walking and navigating it very tensely. And that's how I felt being a Black man in America.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Wow.
Tom Osborn:
Like something most likely won't happen, but there's this sixth sense which makes it kind of just a really tense experience. And so that just really confirmed to me that I had to move back to Kenya. I think this hopefully also encourages other people because I think we do have a lot of great talented folks who leave the continent, go to Europe and the US for school, but just never come back. And I think that's one of the reasons why we end up with poor, ineffective leadership is most people just choose not to come back. And so given all of these things that I was mentioning earlier also about community, I knew that I had to come back and try to be part of the solution here.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Got it. And similar to you, I was also studying in the US. I was in a Chocolate City, or Washington, DC. So I didn't get that sense of fear, I will say. That was new. But I did have a sense of that I didn't belong at some times. And it was really interesting because I loved DC. It's just this cosmopolitan transitional city where honestly it felt like I could be anything, but there still was a stage where I knew that whatever I became, home was the way I needed to go back to and it kind of just drew me back and pulled me through.
So really, really interesting. And also I think it's also one of those things that points that when we were kids, everyone wanted to go to US and Europe because of the great PR that it had. But the truth is when you get there, exactly everything you're talking about, there are more social issues there. There are things that they're also grappling with that just make it even more important for us to come home, to be honest. And so I want to go back to something else you mentioned around your clean energy with Greenchar. Is that how you pronounce it?
Tom Osborn:
Yeah.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Perfect. So when I read about it, it was fascinating that you're just kind of working the intersection of deforestation and waste to energy and your story about your mom, it just also brought it to life in such a beautiful way. But then we note that you shift your focus from that to mental health, with founding Shamiri, which we understand means to thrive in Kiswahili. These are two very different yet deeply impactful stories. So what inspired that pivot? And what did you see in Kenya's mental health landscape for young people that made you feel compelled to build something so novel and so new?
Tom Osborn:
Yeah, so there's three reasons why I decided to make this pivot. So the first, which is generally attention we have in the quote-unquote "International development space", is we have to make this trade-off between, on the one hand, innovation and accessibility. So I was at Greenchar, basically what we were doing is we were turning sugarcane waste into cleaner burning charcoal. But the solution to clean cooking is not cleaner burning charcoal. From an innovation perspective, there are way more efficient tools and systems out there.
But the consequence is because we are, quote-unquote, "Innovating for the bottom of the pyramid", we often find ourselves making poorer version of products that won't fly in any other demographic for the, quote-unquote, "Bottom of the pyramid". And so that, from an intellectual perspective, was something which I didn't really like about the work that we were doing.
The second is more from a possible perspective. What ended up happening with Greenchar is it mostly a supply chain and operation play because the margins are so small and so all the innovation is how do you reduce cost and increase output. Which I realized I didn't have. I was 19, 20, 21, when I was [inaudible 00:18:05] so I just didn't have the skill set to want to do that.
And then finally we got in some investment which decided to pivot the company away from a B2C approach to a B2B approach, which made more sense from both the revenue and the climate perspective. But as I mentioned to begin with, I had coming this because of my mom and of the people. And I think when that shift arrived, which made a lot of business sense, it just made sense for me to transition out of it.
And I didn't anticipate going into mental health at all. So when I went to college initially, I was studying economics, with a focus on environmental and energy policy because that really made a lot of sense. But then I had to take a psychology class because it was a required class that I had to take. And so as I took this class, I realized for the first time that a lot of my experiences growing up, which I hadn't seen from a mental health and wellbeing experiences, are actually mental health and wellbeing conversations. For example, growing up I had to go to public boarding school, but from a kind of early age, we were in a super pressure cooked environment. I had a few friends who either dropped out of school, one who committed suicide. But how I went through all of these things was, this is just life. This is the car that you're under and you basically just wake up, dust yourself.
I hadn't seen it from this mental health experience. It gave me this framework where I could look back to my own lived experience and be like, "Wow." And those kind of people I had around me. So that was the initial pull.
And then the second pull was just now starting to spend more time starting this, just realizing how much of an issue that is starting to become across the continent, primarily because of the youthful nature of the population. So we are a pretty young continent and it's a lot of social pressure on young people to do well, but we don't have a clear pathway for young people to actualize their life outcomes.
And so just that realization made me want to spend more time studying this. I joined a lab at Harvard where they were trying to build out the psychological interventions and that's when the third inspiration came to me. Where there was all of these great academicians who are developing and doing RCTs on these great interventions, but once they wrote the manuscript, that was pretty much the end of the work with this. So I just saw this great potential to turn some of this research into real life interventions that could impact people.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
So could you tell us more about it, as in how was it ultimately appreciated and endorsed when you came back to Kenya to tackle the issue which often isn't spoken about?
Tom Osborn:
Yeah, so we actually realized that mental health seems stigmatized, but only insofar as you're applying a Western lens towards it. So to give a more concrete example, with depression. At least the communities that we were working with in Kenya, if you go and you try to ask people if they're depressed and all that type of stuff, like it will be stigmatized. But if you do break it down to its constituent things like are you having trouble sleeping? Have you been overthinking? Things like that, you realize that those are things people are going through and they already have their own ways of trying to deal with it, mostly religious or social, et cetera.
And then the second thing we realized was it actually makes sense for mental health to be stigmatized if you really take a close look at the history of, quote unquote, "Formal mental health care," in the continent. It's a very violent history. For example, in the Kenyan context, the freedom fighters, the Mau Mau were diagnosed with mass psychosis, and that was used as the rationale for setting up these detention camps to mass detain kind of community. So it makes sense from the history for mental health to be stigmatized.
And so to navigate that, what we realized we needed to do was to orient our way of thinking about care on communities and just realizing that a lot of mental health caregiving is already happening at community level. So be it at the family level, at the church or the mosque level, at the school level. And the challenges, the quote-unquote, "Formal mental health system" is built outside of this. It's built in hospitals in more formal traditional clinics, et cetera.
And so the way our model ended up working was working within communities, right? Now we work in schools, but we also work with churches and mosques and utilizing those resources from that community. So in schools, like working with recent high school graduates to go back to their schools as their fast form of care. Mobilizing other locally available resources like social workers, school counselors, et cetera, and then eventually triaging into the existing systems of care. So take just moving away from using this Western derived diagnostic criteria, which is a separate conversation, but I do think might be completely erroneous, and then orienting care in communities rather than the one-on-one type way that we think about mental health in the West, has really allowed us, since we started doing this in 2021, to scale to serving at least 100,000 people every year, which is pretty large. So that's how we've been going through it.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
So without realizing, we wanted to actually double click a lot on that, which is when we read through a lot of your literature, for example, you did publish a study around decolonizing mental health in Africa. You did frame it around this idea of going from the community first rather than a Western idea of employing more of an individualistic approach. Do you want to comment on that?
Tom Osborn:
Yeah. So basically my philosophy, which may end up being wrong, but my philosophy is that the way we think about mental health, which is 100% American-centric, is wrong. We think about mental health problems as diseases, but all of these assumptions don't make sense. So for example, with malaria, we know malaria is a disease because it has a very specific cause, a very specific set of symptoms. An anti-malarial drug only treats malaria than other diseases. But for mental health, all of these assumptions are wrong. So depression has a lot of different causes. What causes depression also causes anxiety. The symptoms are different, even within the same culture. There's a lot of comorbidity. CBT or therapy works for depression, anxiety. So it's kind of quite complicated.
But now the challenge that we've had is we have, quote-unquote, "Exported" the American gold standard approach around the world. And that I think contributes to not just the stigma, but also just the outcomes for most people who go through these therapies is pretty bad. I think it's just only slightly better than chance. So what we are calling for is a new way of thinking about mental health, which also appreciates and accepts that very violent colonial history of mental health and its introduction across African countries.
Apart from just communities, one thing we are calling from is also moving away from a full emphasis on this formal diagnosis, which we think yes, they're reliable, but they may not be valid diagnosis in of themselves, and moving more to thinking about care from a symptom level and also a recovery/functioning level rather than a formal diagnosis and the treatment of that diagnosis.
And we think that can allow us to think about what mental health is in Africa for Africans, but also requires us to be slightly brave, to be able to stand up and be like, "We think the West has gotten it wrong, and rather than trying to replicate this, we're going to try and build something from scratch." And that's how we also need to publish these studies, because, unfortunately, that's the only way you get credibility is you have to publish studies into all of these RCTs.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Sure.
Tom Osborn:
Yeah, exactly.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
And I deeply appreciate the localized approach. And one of the things I alluded to when we started this conversation was around the through line of community first. I just want to delve in a bit deeper there around what first inspired you to take this community-centered approach, or community first as you have coined it, and what have you learned about how healing works when it happens collectively?
Tom Osborn:
Wow. Yeah, that's a great question. So I've always believed that those closer to the problem are closer to the solution, and problems are normally not siloed. So if you are, for example, struggling with a mental health problem, it affects your partner, your family, your ability to navigate school, for example, if you're a student. And so all of these different elements have to be involved in, quote-unquote, "Your healing", because all these different elements are either contributing to or affected by the problem to begin with.
That is why, for example, the work that we do is if we're working with students, it's school-based, so trying to work with them in a very non-stigmatizing way within the school community and trying to rope in their teachers and their friends and peers as part of this group-based work that we do. And the beauty of that is we think it really normalizes it because I think once you start doing it the one-on-one way, it contributes to almost like othering people. Like they are going through something that they need to [inaudible 00:28:24] and kind of solve for themselves to more an approach where we are working together as a group for both individual and collective healing, right?
Yeah, so that's the inspiration behind this community-first approach is you just basically need to realize that and realize that we are not kind of silos and all of these issues we are facing, be it mental health or climate, et cetera, affects us both individually and collectively. And then how can you tap into the power of community to basically solve for that? I forgot the second part of the question.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
I think you answered it, but at the same time, maybe I will push you on it, which is what have you learned about how healing has worked and maybe anything else that comes to mind around it?
Tom Osborn:
Well, so the one thing which has surprised us is just so when we got into this work, at least on the mental health side, we thought that okay, this was really stigmatized. Kids in schools were not going to sign up for this. But on average, you have about an 80% sign up rate in secondary schools, which has been quite surprising. And so I think for me, maybe the thing which I want is people are actually excited about sociability and community, and maybe are more increasingly seeking it today. And so it's just something great to think about tapping into.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
I agree. And it also really leads into the work that we do, which is around something I'm working with is around community-driven change, where we are thinking a bit more around exactly what you said, that communities know the problems that they're facing. And actually probably even know the solutions to it. It is not for funders to come in and say it, but to support it instead. And so it's not just about giving philanthropy and leaving, but actually thinking about how do you work with the communities to really solution base and actually ensure that you have enduring lasting impact? Because they're a part of the architecture of building the ultimate really solution to sometimes something really wicked problems. So deeply, deeply resonated with that. And it's something that we are also hoping to mainstream a bit more.
But in terms of our next question, so you've spoken a bit about how mental health is a space that allows for deep innovation. Because when we really think about it, no country or healthcare system has really figured out a solution to the universal challenges of mental healthcare, which is what you've said in terms of you can't just adopt what's already been used. It probably does need a bit more depth and localization. But you've also been able to achieve a significant scale and impact with Shamiri in a very-
Tom Osborn:
Short time. Yeah.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Very short time. So thank you for acknowledging that. But what are some of those strategies that have enabled you to reach so many young people and build trust within your community?
Tom Osborn:
Yeah, that's a really good question. So when we think about the work we do, and you'd love this because consultants love framework.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
I love a framework.
Tom Osborn:
Yeah, so we are guided by what you call the Four Enoughs framework-
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Tell me more.
Tom Osborn:
... as we're trying to replicate. And so the first of them is just this idea of is our model good enough? So is it actually leading to consequential impact in the lives of the people like [inaudible 00:31:54]? And here, there are two things to put in place.
So the first is, from a research and rigor perspective, you do need a higher confidence level. You see like a 95 or 99% confidence interval that you're reducing the rates of depression or anxiety amongst the population that you're working with. But then on the other side, from the student and the parent and the school perspective, where they care really more about, we've realized what good enough is for them is just better social relationships. Maybe better academic grades, better strengthening the parent/student kind of relationship.
So figuring out what these indices are has been a pretty good way for us to scale up because then we can set up a benchmark and be like, "Okay, we may not be able to, for all of the 100,000 people we're working with, lead to significant reductions in depression, but if we're helping them succeed in school, build better social relationships then we think that is good enough for us to continue."
The second part, which has actually really helped us figure out how to scale much quickly is this idea of big enough. But here it's mostly about figuring out the constraints about where our model, kind of optimizing for where our model can work best. So in theory, we can work across all secondary schools in Kenya. But in practice, we found it easier to work in Nairobi and Kiambu because it's more urban, it's easier to recruit and train people. And so we started just by being a [inaudible 00:33:31] saturation in schools in Nairobi and Kiambu County before moving to others.
And then the last two are this idea of simple enough. So we don't do our model on our own. We work also with small community-based partner organizations, and so we actually do think of them as our actual client. So basically how do we make our model simply enough for them to be able to replicate on their own with minimal supervision. Because another key that's really helped us scale quite quickly is basically just packaging this training other small organizations and having them work within their communities.
And then eventually the last one is the idea of cheap enough. So just making sure that... Because someone eventually has to pay for it, and that's a constraint we have to innovate around. And just to our cost right now, it's about $7 per person per year, which is pretty cheap, but that's what we think either the government or the parents or philanthropy can pay for.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Great. And I think anyone who's listened to this podcast will know that we love an analogy about food, and so you've given us all these ingredients that we can make something really great out of. But I would love to know from you, which of the elements do you believe could make for a blueprint that we can use beyond Kenya and really is trans-seasonal and transcendent in terms of how we can really deeply innovate in the mental health space going forward?
Tom Osborn:
Wow, that's a tough question.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
You can name the two that you think, if your listener was listening to, they would need to know these two things as they go forward.
Tom Osborn:
So in the mental health space, the first thing I'd say is not being a hundred percent bought on what the, quote-unquote, "Gold standard," is and being willing to think outside of those confines. So just because we have a formal diagnosis for depression, anxiety and all of these things, and we have a formal way of thinking about how to treat it because of this diagnosis, doesn't mean we always have to adopt our approach. If we can orient ourselves... Because these are no issues that are new, right? Before the Americans came up with the DSM and classified as depression, like communities were dealing with these issues and their own healing practices around these issues. And so if we can think outside of what formal psychiatry has offered us that presents as more avenues for innovation.
And then the second is thinking about recovery from the standpoint of the end user. Because one of the challenges we faced when we started this work is we'd go to a parent and we'd be like, "We measured depression pre, post, and your kid had a 30% reduction." And they'd be like, "What the hell does that-
Elisabeth Makumbi:
What does that mean?
Tom Osborn:
"What the hell does that kind of mean?" Right?
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Sure.
Tom Osborn:
But when we started thinking about it from the perspective of things which made sense for them, so your kid is in school for more days or they're seeing some improvement in the academics or better kind of social relationships. And so basically orienting our way, thinking about recovery in the ways that makes sense for the communities that you're working with, rather than always taking to this more formal way of symptom reduction, et cetera.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
So translating it back into that lived human experience.
Tom Osborn:
Exactly. Yeah.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
That's really great. And I'm going to ask you to keep your solution hat still on as we move into a different space, which is, you've spoken quite candidly about the challenges of building a social enterprise more broadly. Particularly as a young person, navigating limited experience, funding, and credibility. So from your journey with Greenchar, which you started at 18, which is... Right?
Tom Osborn:
Yeah.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Still can't believe it. And then founding Shamiri Institute, what are some of the most valuable lessons you've learned about leading and sustaining impact?
Tom Osborn:
I think the main thing for me, especially when I was doing this as a young entrepreneur, and one is yes, I do have a background in psychology, but I'm not an expert. So I think the through line in all of these ventures I've started is I am not the domain expert, and I think that has called me to lead with vulnerability and just being like, "Okay, what I am really bringing to the table here is I can make dots between... I can make out patterns, I can mobilize resources and get people towards vision, but obviously it will be the field domain experts who will get it done." So basically leading from the perspective that as a leader, I can't always have the answers or lead with clarity because we are all figuring this out. I think just being very honest about that I think has been one really great lesson for me.
I think the second thing, which is just an encouragement to other social entrepreneurs, and especially those from the African continent, is just being more open about the playing field not being level and trying to level it. So I think, just to be more concrete, when I started doing this, I think founders had too many power and sometimes they will feel bad or their ego will be threatened if you tried pushing back and being like, "Okay, I'm the one who is here in Kenya. We know what's happening, this is kind what we are doing." But I think over the last three, four years, at least in my experience, people starting to appreciate when us, as founders, put our foot on the ground and be like, "Okay, we are the proximal leaders and we are actually giving you this great opportunity to be part of the impact that we are doing. And so we need to have the conversation from that capacity as equals. Yes, I need your money, but I'm also giving you this great opportunity to have impact, which is your job."
And so basically trying to level that playing ground because I think especially in the continent, it hasn't been really leveled and it's still not level because most of the money we get is from the West.
And I think the third one, which is just emerging from all of these recent issues we're facing is we need to rethink sustainability and we need to rethink the models that we are having towards models that allow us to be able to get and keep money locally. I don't have an exact answer for it, but if we can find ways either to innovate and get our target beneficiaries to pay for this or figure out how to get the government to pay for this or how to raise more local money and local resources, I think that begins to ween us off this extreme dependent on the West, which you think insofar as we do have that dependence on the West, our ability to innovate will be severely handicapped. So we do need to find ways of rethinking sustainability and trying to build models that can be sustainable without Western funding.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Tom, I don't know where you were a year ago, but I probably could have heard the speech one year ago. I mean, for me, I inherited, so I didn't found at 18, but I inherited a social enterprise. And our goal was, which in itself has probably caused its demise, but was to help the brightest young minds in particularly Africa. And it was just as broad as it sounds. But like you said, the challenge we had was that when we asked for money, we didn't really feel that we had the agency to ask for what we needed, and instead funders told us what we needed to do, and so we would almost mold into whatever we needed to be in order to unlock money and ultimately lost our purpose.
But just listening to you and hearing about just the confidence to just be able to say that, "Actually I have the localized solutions and I know what this entity's meant to do. And so yes, you may have the money, but if this is not a partnership, it's probably not going to work," was probably the courage that I needed back then. Ultimately ended up closing, but that's a story for another day. But I think it's really something that I hope others who are struggling in that space are hearing.
Tom Osborn:
And I'm also cognizant that now... And I was listening to another episode of the podcast where they were talking about this, I'm also cognizant that now because I went to Harvard and I'm a second time founder and we have this early success, I am able to be a little bit more courageous. I'm also cognizant about that. But I think it does begin with initially folks who maybe have the credentialing and have the networks beginning to set the standard that this is-
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Absolutely.
Tom Osborn:
... what should be expected. But I do agree with you and I think we just need to start getting people to have more that courage, but also on the funder side for them to start having more humility.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Absolutely, absolutely. And like you said, unlocking more domestic sources would also be great alongside that.
Tom Osborn:
100%, yeah.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
And you also had said this throughout our conversation today around Africa being a young population. In fact, you might be the third person or second who has said this, because it's just becoming more and more telling. And so many of the solutions to local problems will come from young leaders, particularly like yourself. So what is your vision for the next generation of African changemakers, particularly in the realm of mental health and social entrepreneurship? And how do you hope your work will help shape the future?
Tom Osborn:
I'm really excited about the new generation of changemakers in the continent and especially in Kenya. I think the last one one and a half years has been really inspiring, just seeing how willing young people are to demand for change and make change happen. And I think that just gives me a lot of excitement. I think what I hope my work does is presents an exemplar for how you move from wanting to do change and executing on that change. And I think a big part of how we are going to do that, we'll need young people to build local solutions and local companies for local problems. And so I hope the work that I am doing and others are doing starts to be able to provide examples and role models that this is what you can do and this is how you can do it. And so that really keeps me going.
But more broadly on the climate change space, sustainability space, mental health, social change space, I think we're really lucky as a continent. One example I used to give people when I was in the US is I had no idea there was a climate change denialist movement until they moved to the US. Because in Kenya, everyone likes environment and fights with environment, et cetera. And I think this just goes across board for most of the social issues. And now that we are starting to demand better governance and accountability from those who are in systems of power, I think it will, in my hope, allow us to catalyze just this new generation of young people who have already had enough of the status quo, but are also willing to stand up and be counted as being part of the solution.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
This means we have come to the conclusion of our wonderful chat.
Tom Osborn:
No, thank you so much.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
No, thank you, Tom. And I think for me personally, there were just so many different nuggets that I'm going to take home, but I think maybe two of them that were really poignant to me was around firstly the lived human experience. Like you've said, I am a consultant, a lawyer by training, so I love a framework. But breaking it down or boiling it down to its most simple elements, which is how is it going to impact people, how does it affect people? And just really leading more with the heart as opposed to always my mind is something that I'm going to take away from you.
But also just be courageous. I think you said it once, but I will not lie to you, I am just brimming with the idea of the fact that I do understand my community and the localized needs of it, and so I can be courageous in saying, "This is what they need or what we need in order to go forward." And with that, thank you so much.
Tom Osborn:
No, thank you. Really loved the conversation.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Perfect.
Tom Osborn:
Great.
Elisabeth Makumbi:
Tom's work reminds us that innovation doesn't have to look like Silicon Valley. It can look like communities healing together, students reclaiming joy, and young people standing up to shape systems that once excluded them. As someone raised by a powerful and stoic Kenyan mother who left Kenya to live in South Africa away from her own community, I often reflect on how terms like mental health, climate justice, community, and social entrepreneurship were absent from my vocab. These concepts simply weren't part of my household. So it wasn't until much later in life that I began to understand their significance. So hearing Tom share his journey from the sugarcane fields to championing community-driven mental health brought me back to my own path of realization.
Now, I recognize how these once distant ideas are becoming the very bedrock of our lives. They are shaping how we dream, how we build, and how we show up for ourselves and for our communities. These pillars, mental wellbeing, environmental stewardship, and systems change are not only defining the path forward for the next generation, they're also guiding us now as we pause to consider our role in the world and how we serve others and how we care for ourselves, not just physically, but mentally too. If this conversation stirred something in you, share it forward, and as always, keep dreaming in color.
Darren Isom:
Once again, we put some music with the magic, collecting the theme songs from our season's guests and collaborators to create a Spotify playlist for our listeners to enjoy. Find it on Spotify under Dreaming in Color of the Continent.
Thanks for listening to Dreaming in Color. A special shout out to all the folks who make the magic happen. From Africa Insight Communications, our wonderful producers, Mudzithe Phiri, and Tom Kirkwood. Production coordinator, Goddec Orimba. Audiovisual editor, Omamo Gikho. Graphic designer, Ernest Chikuni. And the amazing production crews on the ground in each country.
A huge shout-out to my Bridgespan production colleagues, Cora Daniels, my ever brilliant partner in good trouble. Elisabeth Makumbi, my Joburg-based season cohost. And of course, our fabulous creative director, Ami Diané. What a squad, y'all. Be sure to rate, subscribe, and review wherever you listen to podcasts. Catch you next time.
