Our mission
A business that exists for its village.
The whole profit, not a share of it.
The estate is built as a social enterprise. 100% of profit returns to Kasarani, the village on the shores of Lake Naivasha whose young people built these three villas, staff them now, and are being trained inside them. Not a portion, and not a pledge renewed each year — the architecture of how the business is structured.
The numbers are plain. The estate is fully open, and 2026 is its first profit year. From this year forward, the return to the village is audited independently, every year.
What follows is not a list of causes the property donates to. It is work the people behind the estate have been doing in Kasarani for years — three organisations, a fund, and an apprenticeship we run ourselves — and the money is the smaller part of it.
First, the village.
Kasarani sits between the flower farms and the lake — the greenhouses that supply Europe with cut roses on one side, Lake Naivasha on the other. Its young people grow up beside the landscapes that draw visitors to Kenya from everywhere, and many of them never see those landscapes themselves.
The village's difficulties are concrete, not abstract: drug abuse among teenage boys, the school drop-outs that follow it, early pregnancy among girls, families held together by one parent. What is equally concrete is harder to photograph — a seriousness about education, fierce love inside households that have very little, football on the dirt pitch in the late afternoon, and a generation of local teachers who left on scholarships and chose to come back. They are the people who built the work on this page.
The village, in its own words.
Nothing plays until you ask it to.
Football on a mission.
TAFA — Talanta Africa Football Academy; talanta is Swahili for talent — was founded in 2019 by four Kenyan teachers who had grown up in or near Kasarani, and who saw that the one thing that reliably filled the village halls and touchlines was football. The rule, from the first day: no school, no football.
Of the four founders, Sammy remains — the eldest of nine, who once walked fourteen kilometres a day to school and now leads the football side of the work. Around him, the academy is increasingly run by people it raised itself. The girls' teams are taken as seriously as the boys': the same pitch, the same coaches, the same rule about school.
The academy's own film.
Made by TAFA, not by us. Nothing plays until you ask it to.
Sixteen of them walked into Ullevi Stadium.
In July 2025, sixteen TAFA players under fifteen travelled to Gothenburg, Sweden, for the Gothia Cup — the world's largest youth football tournament — most of them on their first flight. The opening ceremony is held before a hundred thousand people.
The quieter work is daily.
Wezesha Center is a community organisation in Kasarani, run by Sarah, a Kenyan clinical psychologist with years of work among young people carrying addiction and trauma. Its four pillars — Learning Together, Caring Together, Growing Together, Thriving Together — put mental health at the foundation rather than the margin. Tutoring runs alongside it, and families are met and known by name, year after year.
A year that widens the world.
Since before the estate existed, the family behind it has partnered with Crossroads Foundation, a Hong Kong non-profit founded in 1995. Young leaders from TAFA and Wezesha — most of whom have never travelled beyond Nairobi — go to Hong Kong for a year of mentored volunteer service there, and are then sponsored through university in the field the year showed them. Kelvin, who is training as a teacher, returns in May 2026. Jackie and Fred came home before him — one studying psychology, the other special-needs education — and both now serve at TAFA, raising children who are where they themselves were ten years ago.
The fund behind the fares.
Talanta Africa Fund, a US-registered nonprofit, carries the costs none of this moves without: the flights, visas and board of the Hong Kong year, the university sponsorships that follow it, school and college scholarships in Kasarani, and — together with TAFA — the journey to Gothenburg.
Trained inside the working estate.
The last strand we run ourselves. Each year, the O'Leleshwa Hospitality Apprenticeship takes a small number of young people from Kasarani and the surrounding community — TAFA graduates, Crossroads alumni, young people who stayed on after the build — and trains them inside the running of the property. The first cohort holds four positions: assistant chef, butler, housekeeping and gardening. Each apprentice is paired with the senior member of the team who carries that role and its standard, and the teaching happens during the work, not apart from it.
An apprenticeship runs from six months for a gardener to two years for an assistant chef — the depth of the training matching the depth of the skill. When you stay, the host who greets you may be an apprentice; they will tell you so themselves, with their name and the role they are learning. Guests, we have found, ask after their progress at breakfast.
The programme is run with Lodgistics, alongside Jenetta Barry and the senior team, and its intent is to launch careers, not to keep staff. An apprentice who meets the standard leaves with a certificate we award sparingly — and, we expect, a place waiting at the strongest houses in East and Southern Africa. The measure is not how many we keep, but how many flourish elsewhere.
Vivian is one of the first. A TAFA member from Kasarani, sponsored by Talanta Africa Fund through her diploma at the Amboseli Institute of Hospitality and Technology, she worked on the build during her school holidays and is now the kitchen's apprentice — the two-year training, beside the chef. Her path runs through every organisation on this page.
The community that built this place continues to be built by it.
More than fifty Kasarani apprentices laid the dry-stone walls; many stayed to run the houses. The friendships behind all of this were made years before the property was bought, and they do not depend on it.
We are happy to be questioned.
We publish what we can substantiate; nothing on this page is aspiration dressed as fact. The programmes are operational, the partners are partners because we work with them, and the audited accounts of the profit return will exist from 2026 onward. To read them, write to us and ask.
If the architecture matters to you, the rest follows easily. The profit from a stay here is what returns to Kasarani.