The SHM Foundation Africa is dedicated to finding innovative ways to tackle some of the world’s most complex and stubborn problems.
Whether the field is education, tackling illness, global mental health or finding new ways to stimulate growth and creativity, we are passionate about supporting people and communities across Africa develop simple but effective ways to make change happen.
Our approach is straightforward but transformative. We support organisations that we believe in and can work in partnership with, combining our own skills and capabilities with theirs, to maximise social impact for all.
Empowering Local Communities
There is no geographical monopoly on good ideas or creative energy, so our parent organisation – the SHM Foundation – works globally.
The SHM Foundation has been working in Kenya on education projects since 2010 and has expanded over the last decade into work on mental health, well-being, livelihoods and skills, employment, youth, and the arts and creative industries in Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
Over the years, we have been drawn to more and more projects doing extraordinary work in Africa. And we have found that, as well the quality of the work the projects were doing, there were two other striking benefits of the partnerships we established. One was that there was often a great fit: a synergy between the skills we had acquired and gleaned from our global work, and the sheer ingenuity and energy of creative solutions we encountered across the African continent. The second was that we found we were learning from those projects in ways that enhanced our ability to bring innovation elsewhere in the world.
The SHM Foundation Africa (SHMFA) was set up in 2025 to help us deepen and expand that work, and to create an African organisation and innovation base, led by an African Board, from which to further the intellectual and cultural exchanges that we believe in.
SHMFA is now a force for good in its own right, identifying ways we can empower local communities to make a difference, ways we can channel our own skills and capabilities, and above all ways we can continue to learn and to develop creative ideas that can help us make change happen everywhere we work. Our aim is to expand the impact of what we do through partnerships within Africa and beyond.
We are currently supporting and designing innovative solutions in health, education, employment, skills and the creative industries.