New partnership opens financial opportunities for formerly incarcerated women in Kenya
In September 2025, SMEP Microfinance Bank, HOPE International’s microfinance institution in Kenya, officially joined forces with Clean Start Africa to, for the first time ever, offer microfinance services to formerly incarcerated women. We are thrilled to come alongside them with training, discipleship, and business loans as they re-enter their communities.
Clean Start Africa is an award-winning social enterprise founded in 2015 by Teresa Njoroge, whose personal experience in Kenya’s prison system inspired its mission. Over the past decade, Clean Start Africa has supported over 4,000 women—both incarcerated and formerly incarcerated—through advocacy, vocational training, and reintegration programs. Their work also addresses systemic injustices and the socioeconomic challenges that often lead to imprisonment, especially among vulnerable groups.
Clean Start Africa has developed a comprehensive five-stage reintegration process for the women they serve. It includes:
- Dignified reception: Women are warmly welcomed and provided with essential supplies.
- Ufunuo (“revelation”) training: a three-tiered program covering healing and self-discovery, vocational skills (e.g., cooking, construction, and textile making), and advanced leadership and advocacy training.
- Reintegration: employment opportunities in five industries—culinary, construction, briquette making, textile, and beauty.
- Safe housing: transitional housing and access to employment or seed capital.
- Sisters On The Outside (SOTO): a movement empowering formerly incarcerated women to support those still in prison.
The women who work with Clean Start Africa are now actively engaged in economic activities like crafting traditional Kenyan wear, packaging honey, and manufacturing sanitary towels for those still in the prison system who cannot afford it.
In late 2023, HOPE’s associate director of microfinance marketing & product management, Mary Mathenge, met with Teresa to explore Clean Start Africa’s approach. Over the following year, teams from HOPE and our Kenyan microfinance institution, SMEP, visited Clean Start Africa’s offices, met the women they serve, and began exploring how we could support their mission. The partnership was formalized in September 2025.
This collaboration adds a new dimension to Clean Start Africa’s reintegration services. Women completing the vocational training cycle will be invited to join SMEP loan groups, where they will receive biblically based business and financial training, hear the Word of God, and access group loans to invest in their businesses.
Mary Mathenge describes why these services are especially impactful for this group:
This is a group of people we haven’t reached before—formerly incarcerated women seeking financial reintegration alongside social reintegration. … The criminal justice system impacts them beyond their sentences, perpetuating cycles of poverty, discrimination, and exclusion. One of the things I love about HOPE is the word ‘dignity.’ We are the first financial institution to go to them and offer to serve them.
Teresa Njoroge echoed the significance of the partnership.
This goes beyond mere signatures on paper. Justice-related systems globally fail to address the needs of women, perpetuating injustice and hindering economic progress and peace. This collaboration is unlocking avenues to capital, mentorship, training, and genuine economic engagement for those historically marginalized.
Together with Clean Start Africa, we are excited to pave the way for a more inclusive future—restoring dignity, opportunity, and hope for women who have long been overlooked.
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Pictured in header image: leaders of HOPE International, SMEP Microfinance Bank, and Clean Start Africa at the partnership ceremony
