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The couple of Bob and Ingrid Munro have left their mark in Kenya via sports, community service and finance.
Bob Munro created the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA), the largest of its kind on the continent, and which aimed at using sports for youth empowerment and social and economic wellbeing. That was in 1987 when sporting talents from Mathare slums crossed Juja Road and gathered to play soccer at the PCEA grounds in Eastleigh estate. They shared sleeveless jerseys and a few balls in what snowballed into Mathare United Football Club in 1994 — which later became the first club outside the Kenyan Premier League to win the 1998 Moi Golden Cup.
Bob’s wife, Ingrid, was making her name in Jamii Bora, a slum-based community ‘merry-go-round’ that is today Jamii Bora Bank.
Bob Munro: A Canadian from St Catherine’s township was working for an environmental policy adviser for the UN in Nairobi when he founded MYSA as a youth-led sporting initiative that’s Africa’s largest youth soccer programme with over 1,300 teams and 18,000 participants.
The lover of hockey and baseball started a development consultancy, XXCEL Africa Ltd, in 1985 in Nairobi, which would later become the basis for MYSA, which used a league system in which competing teams earned extra points for community service. MYSA and Mathare United FC have won among others; the 1992 UNEP Global 500 Award for Environmental Innovation, the 2001 CAF/African Youth Development Award and the 2004 World Sports Academy/Laureus Sport for Good Award.
Ingrid Munro: This Swedish architect and housing expert with the UN founded Jamii Bora Trust in 1999 after retiring from Africa Housing Fund. What began as a group of beggars (and not a few hookers and crooks) contributing 50 cents a week, grew into a-200,000 strong social economic ‘bottom of the pyramid’ movement that shuttled thousands out of blighting poverty.
Jamii Bora was acquired by City Finance in 2010 and rebranded it into Jamii Bora Bank.
The Munros are the parents of Mia Munro (a civil servant in Sweden) and Camilla Munro (lecturer, University of Stockholm, Sweden). Then there are John Waithaka, James Kareithi and Karl Maina Munro (all adopted brothers and former street boys). Waithaka’s adoption in 1990 was the first High Court case of a mzungu adopting an African child in Kenya. Waithaka, a loans officer, died in 2013. Kareithi is also a loans officer. Maina is an international relations master’s student in Sweden.
