Timeline of our journey

The Walking with Africans Foundation was founded in 2007, though it would take us another two years to mobilize our team, join forces with our partner organization, EPID-Kenya, and begin raising funds for a pilot program launch in May 2009. WAF grew out of a longstanding partnership between Burke Presbyterian Church (BPC) in Virginia and the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, Kibwezi Mission Area. The seed of an idea came even earlier in 2004 when James Munthali returned to Burke from serving in Kibwezi as a Global Intern. Serving as a Global Intern on behalf of BPC, James Munthali worked on various partnership projects in 2004 and the idea of a microfinance program grew out of discussions with members of the Kibwezi community. Inspired by the many successful endeavors of this partnership – including strengthening preschool and primary education, supporting orphan care and a vocational training center – James found he could leverage his own background as a career economist to look into some ways of responding to the community’s growing interest in a savings and loan program, especially in the light of widespread poverty he had observed in the region.

Immersed in Kibwezi life, he and his co-worker, Ed Parker (a key member of the WAF team who served as a Program Development and Operations Director) participated in several thoughtful discussion about the aspirations and drive to implement viable solutions that were organic to the Kibwezi people, their culture and community. These discussions led to the concept of WAF and its guiding principles of cultivating self-sustaining initiatives, working with local community leaders and empowering the poor to improve and transform their own lives.

Initially, WAF worked in cooperation with our partner organization, Effort of the Poor in Development (EPID-Kenya), a local Kenyan non-governmental organization (NGO) . Together, we launched a successful pilot program in the rural town of Kibwezi in 2009. We began with 2 peer groups and 41 members. The goal of Epid-Kenya groups was to reach 400-500 clients to be able to break even and be successful.

Over the next decade , through this model, WAF supported microfinancing groups with varying levels of success, eventually developing our table banking systems of support, independent of Epid-Kenya.

In 2019, James Munthali, Ed Parker and David Norman went to Malawi to explore starting groups there. The three determined that it was feasible for Walking with Africans to support table banking both in Malawi and Kenya and 2 groups were started in Malawi. The oldest two existing WAF groups in Kenya, Imani and Wiwana wa Kivuti, began in 2019, transitioning from microfinance to the table banking model. Several other groups struggled and did not survive during Covid, but Imani and Wiwana wa Kivuti persevered and continue to be strong groups.

When a team returned after Covid, new groups were canvassed and if they were operating independently and finding some success, a few more were brought under the WAF umbrella, meaning they were given some capital to allow bigger loans, provide a phone and added to the groups who meet with our local reps. Between 2021 and 2025, WAF representatives visited from the United States yearly and the number of groups blossomed to multiple groups in Kenya and in Malawi, some formed by our foundational groups as an investment. Walking with Africans has steadily grown in over 16 years to mentor and support multiple groups in Kenya and Malawi with over 200 members! In Kenya, the officers in each group have formed an umbrella organization, meeting together to support, advise and promote each other.

We look forward to the opportunity to expand our reach to other vulnerable communities across rural Africa.