The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by the Global Fund for Community Foundations on 15 April 2013. The original article can be found here.

image: Jane Weru (left) and Kingsley Mucheke

It is with great pleasure and pride that we announce the first winners of the Olga Alexeeva Memorial Prize: Jane Weru and Kingsley Mucheke of the Akiba Mashinani Trust, Kenya. In choosing Jane Weru and Kingsley Mucheke, the judges felt strongly that “they represented best the full range of the award’s purposes”.

In the words of the award criteria, they “demonstrated remarkable leadership, creativity and results in developing philanthropy for progressive social change in an emerging market country or countries”.

The judges were all impressed by the explicit focus of Jane and Kingsley on the most marginalized community in Kenya—landless slum dwellers—and by the way they have developed a philanthropic mechanism to support transformational efforts by that community. “In terms of potential to transform realities, their work strikes me the most”, commented one judge. “They seem to have found a truly innovative way to tackle systemic and behavioral challenges, and created a model that generates amazing impact which combines sustainability and scale”, said another.

Just as we found creating a shortlist a hard task, so our judges noted “the difficulty of making a decision among such an impressive set of finalists who represent very different contexts for the development of philanthropy. All of the finalists have made substantial contributions in their respective countries and have done so in very different ways. They all deserve recognition for their important contributions”. They explicitly congratulated the other finalists for their leadership and dedication.

We too would like to congratulate Jane and Kingsley and the other finalists as well. Each one of them would have made a worthy winner. If you haven’t already done so, you can read all about their achievements in a special Alliance supplement. The prize will be presented in July at the International Forum on Emerging Markets, Emerging Philanthropies in Peterhof, Russia.

The Olga Alexeeva Memorial Prize is for an individual who has demonstrated remarkable leadership, creativity and results in developing philanthropy for progressive social change in an emerging market country or countries.