Jiwo Paro was founded in 2014 with an individual capital infusion.
Our mission is to enable rural women and youth achieve economic independence.
The organization provides sustainable credit options, market-led skills development, and business learning to create an ecosystem that allowed for rural women and youth to thrive financially.
Our Co-Founders
Dancan Onyango and Akinyi Awora’s stories each took a different path to get them toward the creation of Jiwo Paro. A banker and a community development specialist came together to rethink the way rural women and youth tackle poverty by redesigning financial services for the bottom of the pyramid.
Dancan Onyango
Dancan has a progressive career in banking and financial inclusion consulting. He has worked for and with fast-paced organizations in African and Asian markets. He worked as a digital financing consultant before making the change to create financial solutions that enabled rural women and youth to rethink solutions to poverty.
He is also a recipient of President Obama’s and the US State Department’s Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders. Dancan holds a Bachelor of Commerce and certifications in Financial Inclusion and Public Policy and Innovation for Economic Development, both from Harvard Kennedy School and a Business and Entrepreneurship from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His countries of work experience include Kenya, Cambodia, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, and Tanzania.
He is currently an MBA candidate at Babson College
Akinyi Awora
Akinyi’s life’s work is dedicated to designing solutions that disrupt the way the world thinks about development. Her philosophy, ‘Lead with Love’ is the driving force behind her campaign to end poverty. By infusing every solution, we come up with the inherent belief that all human beings deserve to live with dignity above all else. She has worked towards organizing young people to take the lead in rethinking our approaches towards sustainable development unison-insurance.com.ua.
Akinyi has worked as a design thinking consultant, helping businesses, civil societies, and public servants design products and programs built for impact. Before co-founding Jiwo Paro, she founded Learning Growth Africa, a pan-African network of African youth dedicated to leapfrogging African learning systems into the future. She is a Mandela Washington Fellow, a #IAmRemarkable trainer, an Africa Youth for SDG’s Champion, and a relentless force in advocating for sustainable development. She also is the chairperson Kisumu Youth Business Leaders Guild.
She holds a BA in Community Development from Maasai Mara University. Akinyi attended a global leadership program at Howard University, receiving a certificate in Civic Leadership and public management
