Sharon Onyango 

Sharon Onyango is a Cohort 2 Umholi we Africa Fellow and a grantmaking and partnerships specialist who champions locally led development, working alongside communities to shape solutions that build on their own knowledge, priorities and strengths. She currently serves as Programme Manager of the Maacom Youth Programme in the Office of the Senate Minority Whip, Senate of Kenya, where she has steered a KES 25 million community grant portfolio that opens doors to education, skills, financial inclusion and enterprise for young Kenyans. 

Trained as a chemical engineer, Sharon is a development practitioner and youth advocate who brings a systems-thinking approach to social impact. Over more than seven years in Kenya and the United States, she has worked where government, foundations, the private sector and grassroots organisations meet. She designs programmes, mobilises resources and builds the kind of accountability that keeps partners invested and communities at the centre. 

Her work connects policy and practice. As Special Youth Advisor in the Senate, she helped shape a partnership with Microsoft to widen young people’s access to AI skills, and her evidence-based briefings have informed leadership decisions on policy and funding. On the ground, young people supported through her grant programmes are moving on to tertiary education and starting businesses of their own. 

Some of her most meaningful work has been with pastoralist women in Narok County. Alongside more than 1,300 Maasai women, she helped turn informal milk sales into organised enterprise, raising average household income from less than KES 100 to around KES 540 a day, more than a five-fold increase. She then helped facilitate a partnership with a leading Kenyan bank to accept the women’s milk sales as collateral, giving women long excluded from formal finance access to affordable credit. 

Sharon holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Michigan State University, where she was a Mastercard Foundation Scholar. She welcomes connections with governments, funders and partners working to expand opportunity for Africa’s young people and women.