My journey with Impact Africa Network began three years ago when I applied and was accepted into the first cohort of the Bridge Career Accelerator program. This was an intense program designed for final-year university students, and I was fortunate enough to have qualified for it while still in my second year.
The program helped reshape my view of professional life and provided clarity on who I wanted to be in my career, as I was pursuing my Bachelor's Degree in Real Estate at the time. The mental models helped cultivate and sharpen my decision-making and problem-solving skills, which later played a key role in landing my first job. The program helped me immensely with personal branding and developing the necessary technical and soft skills that would help me thrive in the workplace.
Shortly before my graduation in 2024, a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn and expressed interest in having me join a real estate startup that I came to know as Roots Africa. Roots Africa is one of the many portfolio companies under the Impact Africa Network. However, it was still in its early stages back then and held much promise due to the vision that founder Mark Karake had for it. I applied for a research analyst role at Roots Africa, which was part of the 1-year Impact Africa Network innovation fellowship program. The fellowship program exists to put young Africans at the forefront of building and owning technological solutions that address some of the continent's most pressing problems.
As my fellowship period is coming to an end, I feel that my knowledge about the real estate industry has grown immensely. I am incredibly passionate about the field, and I plan to dedicate the rest of my life to it. Joining Roots Africa was one of the best things that ever happened because of the exposure I got. I have contributed ideas that helped build an amazing residential real estate listing platform and scale it from just 4 to 400 listings in 6 months, establishing important networks within the real estate industry. I learned to write in-depth research reports on the current state of the Kenyan and often African real estate market, and build a proprietary due diligence framework for vetting both local and foreign real estate developers in Kenya.
Similar to my colleagues who have been through Impact Africa's innovation fellowship program would tell you, I hit the ground running from my first day here. It's a high-velocity environment, and high performance is expected of every innovation fellow that joins the company. As the founder likes to put it, you can do your life's best work here. In my personal experience, I have found this to be true, and I am incredibly honoured to be part of the team that's building Roots Africa here at Impact Africa Network.
