Kenya: Nairobi's Kibera Slums, and Rural Villages

Mission: To use the transformative benefits of yoga to empower vulnerable communities in Kenya. The project is based in the Kibera slums of Nairobi, which house close to 1 million people, with little access to safe water or sanitation. Disease is prevalent, while schools and job opportunities are scarce. For many youth, petty crime and gangs become a means of survival. Africa Yoga Project offers free yoga classes and provides teacher training and financial support to young people who want to teach yoga in their communities. 

Inspiration: Formerly a yoga teach in New York City, Africa Yoga Projects co-founder Paige Elenson went to Nairobi for a few months in 2006. Used to seeing a studio on every corner in New York, she found none in Kibera, but she knew that the people, stressed and sickly from crowded living conditions, needed yoga. "There was this gap, and I wanted to fill it," she says, "I realized, if not me, then who? With the abundance we have in the yoga community, we need to be activists, sharing yoga in places that are hungry for it."

One of the first students she trained, Moses Mbajah, joined her as the co-director of Africa Yoga Project after he attended a Baron Baptiste teacher training in Mexico, in 2008. Mbahah wants to train other youths like himslef to transform their own lives and participate in the bettement of their communites. "Yoga has taught me to about taking a stand for myself, my family, my country and my world." he says.

Impact: in 2009 Africa Yoga Project invited Baptiste, an international Power Yoga teacher, to give a teacher training in Nairobi, and now 43 young teachers lead more than 100 class per week, with roughly 3,000 students each month in Nairobi and nearby villages. The teachers offer classes to groups they wish to help, such as schoolchildren, women entrepreneurs, and orphans. Many report that yoga has changed their lives and the lives of their students; they feel less stress, eat better, and practice better hygiene. Some fell empowered to improve their lives whether by getting further eductiaon or by starting a small business. Some say they've found a new gang to belong to, "yoga gang."

Highlight: In 2009, right after violence swept the country in the wake of a contested election, Eleson and Mbajah taught yoga, along with circus arts, in refugee campls. The saw people from warring tirbes relax into the practice of yoga even offering adjustment to each other and smiling in friendship. "The scope of yoga is so much bigger than teaching asanas" Eleson says. "It's service and connection to the self and others. You [can be] a means of community transformation."

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