The people I interviewed in Nairobi had one thing in common. It wasn’t until I’d left Kenya that I realized it. I know I’m about to make a sweeping statement, but you’ve done so well bearing with a name like Solving Africa that I figured why not test the waters even further. These people weren’t in sync with their surroundings. It didn’t matter what was happening around them or what their realities were, they operated at a plane above it all. They were either really oblivious to the odds they were up against or really optimistic that they were all the difference that there needed to be. Or both.

Take Fostina Mani for example. I met her after the focus group at USIU. She’s about 40, married, has a teenage son, Head of Fundraising at the university, serves as faculty mentor to the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) club and on Saturdays, runs a business school in Ukambani, her husband’s home town. I can’t say she had an epiphany. She was like many of us who visit our rural hometowns and see that very little has changed. She saw that would-be entrepreneurs set up small, barely-stocked shacks and called it a business. They rarely took steps to evaluate and improve their businesses and planning for the future simply didn’t factor in. When the rains don’t fall as heavily or as frequently as expected, crops die and the village calls it drought. But the grass, flowers and weeds around the village tell a different story. They bear witness against the farmers that there was water somewhere else.

Fostina did more than just observe. Transforming her village was easier than she’d thought. She called a meeting of Ukambani entrepreneurs. At first it was just women coming to these meetings. They discussed the importance of keeping accounts, why it was necessary to know how much one was making or spending, and easy methods to begin doing so. They discussed the idea of co-operatives and seeking grants to expand their rural businesses. She explained that there were resources out there for villages like theirs to get loans and expert help to develop themselves. Soon, husbands heard about what their wives were learning and they too started showing up. The community provided a place for what has become the Ukamba School of Business. What started out as just some bookkeeping advice is now a building with a library and computer room with Internet access, which she pays for.

When I visited, the class was discussing irrigation. There were two class assistants, students from the SIFE club. They helped with everything from searching the Internet for answers to questions that might come up during class to grant writing. Fostina started by asking why there was a drought in Ukambani. Everyone agreed it was a lack of sufficient rainfall. She then told the class that Israel is a country in the desert, they barely get any rain, but somehow they are able to grow food to feed themselves. She asked the class to come up with ideas of how to water their plants if no more rain fell. They said they could drill a borehole. It would cost almost $10,000 – a hefty sum for a small village. They could dig a well but they couldn’t use it to grow maize. Their groundwater was salty and maize couldn’t survive on this kind of water.

Despite the knowledge that maize was not optimal given their location and unpredictable rainfall, it seemed every farmer present still only thought to plant it. Maize is used to make Ugali, the most Kenyan of Kenyan dishes. Asking the people of Ukambani to plant something else was almost like asking a fish not to swim or asking a Korean not to eat Kimchi. If they were to survive, adaptation was imperative. This was the point Fostina was driving at. As class progressed, someone mentioned River Harvesting. He explained that it was a technique used in the old days to collect water for irrigation. Instead of entirely damming a river, people would build walls in the river. As the water flowed, it would collect in the pseudo-dam and when full, continue flowing along its normal course. Class ended with the decision to seek grant money for a borehole with a River Harvesting project in the meantime. I realized that Fostina wasn’t just transforming her village, she was transforming minds. People were learning to look at their surrounding differently, to take charge of what they could control and seek help when necessary. By having these kinds of conversations in a culture where people believe that the hand nature deals you is the lot that God has given you, Fostina is pushing the limits of Ukambani’s vision.