About
Partner with CECF
Four kinds of partnership, each with a different ask — the same consortium that makes CECF's single, sequenced pathway possible.
Government & agencies
Ministries, authorities, counties and the Judiciary. Reach groups you already serve, through a delivery partner already in the field.
Read moreBanks & insurers
A pipeline of registered, trained, pre-vetted groups — and products designed for how groups actually behave.
Read moreDonors & development partners
Fund formalisation, adult education or learning centres, with reporting that includes what did not work.
Read moreCorporate sponsorship
Sponsor a training cycle, a convening or a learning centre, with visibility that is honest about your role.
Read moreWhat we will always tell you. What the money bought, what it did not achieve, and where our figures are estimates. A partner who finds that out later is a partner we have lost.
Register → License → Train → Access credit → Resolve disputes internally → Secure cover
Individually, each partnership addresses one piece of the puzzle. Our distinct contribution is turning separate bilateral partnerships into that single staged pathway, where each step compounds the value of the last.
What a partnership means here. Not a logo exchange. Each of these is a working arrangement with named contacts, agreed referral routes and, in most cases, a signed memorandum. Where a partnership is at proposal stage rather than signed, we say so.
Partnerships
Government & agencies
You hold the mandate. We hold the last mile. Ministries and authorities design services that grassroots groups are entitled to and frequently never reach. The gap is rarely policy. It is that nobody has explained the service to a treasurer in a language and a place she can act on.
CECF is a delivery partner for that last mile — already in the field, already trusted by the groups, and working under written agreement rather than around you.
What we offer
- Field presence across Nairobi’s sub-counties and partner counties
- Applications that arrive complete, reducing rejection and rework at your registry
- Sensitisation and training delivered in Kiswahili, at community level
- Data and reporting on uptake, gaps and where the process breaks down
- A convening capability — we host stakeholder workshops that ministries attend
Current government partnerships
Partnerships
Banks & insurers
The market you cannot underwrite is not the market you think it is. Group lending is hard for a reason: most groups are unregistered, keep no usable records, and dissolve over disputes rather than over money. Any of those three will sink a facility.
Our work removes all three before the group reaches you.
What a CECF referral has already done
- Registered under the Community Groups Registration Act, with a constitution on file
- Governed — elected office-bearers and a written dispute process
- Trained in bookkeeping and in what a loan actually costs
- Recorded — contribution history you can read
- Pre-vetted against your own stated requirements, so the file arrives complete
Where we already work
I&M Bank
Group account structures, group lending, LPO financing, asset financing, pre-vetting pipelines and joint financial literacy delivery.
Kingdom Bank
Group savings products and credit pipelines built around chama and table-banking behaviour.
Britam Insurance
Micro-insurance and group cover, so a single hospital admission does not empty a group fund.
What we ask in return. Products designed for group realities rather than individual products with a group label, published requirements so we can prepare against them, and outcome data back — approvals, defaults and reasons. Without that last one, we cannot improve what we send you.
Partnerships
Donors & development partners
Fund the unglamorous middle, where most programmes stop. There is generous funding for training grassroots groups, and generous funding for financial inclusion. There is very little for the administrative work in between — the filing, the follow-up, the second visit to an office that lost the paperwork.
That middle is where formalisation actually succeeds or fails, and it is what we do.
Current funding priorities
- Regulatory and administrative access a three-year programme to reach 30,000 groups and MSMEs annually
- Market entry and expansion financial literacy, negotiated products and aggregation infrastructure
- Digital platform rollout — expanding self-registration and market-linkage coverage into priority counties
- Internal dispute resolution — accredited mediation training at scale
- Phased county replication — starting with Turkana, West Pokot and Elgeyo Marakwet
How we report
Outcomes, not activities
Certificates in hand rather than applications filed. Accounts opened rather than referrals made. Groups alive at twelve months.
Audited annually
Independent audit, published, available to anybody who asks.
Including failures
Every report names what did not work and what it cost. A report without that section is not a report.
Partnerships
Corporate sponsorship
Specific, visible, and honestly described. We do not offer general association. Every sponsorship is attached to something that happens on a date, in a place, for a named group of people — so both of us can say exactly what your support did.
A training cycle
Five sessions across a sub-county, materials, venue and facilitation, for roughly forty groups.
Reported by: groups trained, completion rate, follow-up at six monthsA convening
A stakeholder workshop bringing ministries, counties, financial institutions and group representatives into one room.
Reported by: attendance, institutions represented, commitments madeA county rollout
Extending the digital platform and field-officer coverage into one new priority county — onboarding, training materials and first-year field presence.
Reported by: groups onboarded, certificates issued, platform activity at 12 monthsA mediation cohort
Accredited mediation training for a cohort of community mediators, run with the Judiciary.
Reported by: mediators accredited, disputes handled, outcomesWhat we will not do. Photograph beneficiaries in ways that trade their dignity for your visibility, imply your funding achieved more than it did, or present a target as a result. If those are the terms, we are the wrong partner.