Across rural Kenya, women run the most reliable small businesses in their communities — and for decades, traditional banks called them too risky to lend to. In 2014, a small Nairobi-based social enterprise called Cherehani Africa decided that assumption was the problem, not the women.
She sells vegetables at dawn. She sews school uniforms through the night. She raises dairy cows, runs a small kiosk, bakes mandazi for the morning market. Across rural Kenya, women like her form the backbone of local economies — and for generations, the formal financial system treated them as invisible.
Not because they lacked discipline or business sense. Because the systems designed to assess creditworthiness — collateral, credit history, fixed income records — were never built with them in mind.
Cherehani Africa was founded in 2014 to change that calculation entirely.
A Problem Hidden in Plain Sight
Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where more women than men become entrepreneurs. And yet women-owned businesses across the continent face a financing gap of more than $42 billion. Traditional banks cite the obstacles fluently: no collateral, no credit history, no fixed address, no formal income records. The loans go elsewhere — to businesses already capitalised, already formal, already visible to the systems built to serve them.
The result is a paradox that has persisted for generations: the hardest-working entrepreneurs on the continent are also its most financially excluded.
Built by People Who Understood the Gap
Cherehani Africa was co-founded by Nasreen Ali Mohamed, who grew up in Mombasa watching women in her own community build businesses with no path to formal credit, and Wesley Owiti, who now serves as the company’s CEO. Together, they built a social enterprise headquartered in Nairobi with a singular mission: become the financial partner of choice for women-owned businesses across Africa.
Rather than retrofitting a traditional bank’s risk model, they built something new — one rooted in the social structures rural women already trusted.
Technology and Trust, Combined
Cherehani’s model pairs mobile-based technology with the proven structure of micro-savings groups. Customers join locally registered groups of 10 to 25 women in similar trades — group membership becomes a prerequisite for loans, and peer accountability drives consistently strong repayment rates.
The company delivers more than working capital. Its product range includes school-fee financing, dairy loans, and water-tank financing that lets households shift from rain-fed agriculture to reliable irrigation — each repaid in manageable instalments via mobile money, with every repayment building a formal credit history that unlocks larger loans over time. Financial literacy content, tailored to each woman’s business type, is delivered alongside every loan.
The Scale of What They’ve Built
Since 2014, Cherehani Africa has provided credit and business assets to more than 30,000 women-owned enterprises across rural Kenya — work that independent analysts estimate has positively impacted over 130,000 lives, once households and dependents are counted. Early backers including the U.S. African Development Foundation, the Citi Foundation, Levi Strauss & Co., and fintech accelerator DFS Lab helped fund the model’s growth from a small pilot into a scaled platform.
Recognised Where It Matters
In June 2025, Cherehani Africa was named Impact Enterprise of the Year at the Africa Impact Investment Awards in Accra, Ghana — selected from 64 nominations by a panel of 11 judges representing leading institutions across the continent’s impact investing ecosystem. The judges’ citation was simple: a technology-driven approach to supporting over 30,000 rural women entrepreneurs, positively impacting more than 130,000 lives.
What the world often gets wrong about African women in poverty is the assumption that they lack capability or ambition. Cherehani Africa’s growth tells a different story: they were never lacking in capability. They were lacking in access.
When a determined entrepreneur is finally given the tools she was always capable of using, the results are not surprising. They are inevitable. Cherehani Africa simply built the door 30,000 women had been knocking on for years.
Share this story. Because access to finance is not a privilege. It is the first step to everything.
