Jane: Barber Shop Owner
Training and Equipping Female Business Owners
We believe in the power of women to drive change within their communities. Our programs focus on training and equipping female entrepreneurs in East Africa with the skills, resources, and knowledge they need to start and grow successful businesses. Through hands-on workshops and mentorship, women gain the confidence and tools to lift their families out of poverty and build brighter futures.
Our Work
Help Us Create Brighter Futures
Sponsor a Child
Your sponsorship ensures that a child is able to remain healthy and well educated while enabling their parent to build a sustainable income source.
Empower a Family
When you partner with a parent, you help them embark on a path that prevents an entire family from enduring devastating circumstances caused by extreme poverty.
Volunteer
Join our group of amazing volunteers who invest their time and talent in activities that make our empowering programs possible.
Creating Change, One Family at a time.
For over a decade, Under the Same Tree has been dedicated to empowering communities in East Africa through programs that address the root causes of poverty. We understand that seeing the hardships people endure globally can feel overwhelming. You want to make a difference, but it can feel so far away.
At Under the Same Tree, we provide a tangible way for you to come alongside families and help change their stories for the better. Through our preventative, two-generational approach, we equip families with the tools they need to rise out of poverty and create brighter futures for their children.
Our sustainable, community-driven model empowers families through microfinance programs, youth apprenticeships, and support for vulnerable children. And we believe in keeping you connected to the lives you’ve touched, so you can see firsthand the lasting impact of your involvement.
Prevention
Under the Same Tree enables you to help prevent vulnerabilities such as homelessness, exploitation and child abandonment through economic empowerment. By providing families with the resources to build sustainable incomes, we prevent program members from facing the heartbreak and trauma of these challenges in the first place.
EMPOWERment
You have the opportunity to empower individuals to create sustainable sources of income. As they grow their resources, they repay the loan, and your investment moves forward to the next person, multiplying its impact over and over. Additionally, their involvement in UTST empowerment groups promotes mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being, creating a holistic approach to transformation.
Future Building
Our two-generational approach allows parents to focus on building sustainable incomes while ensuring their children’s education and nutrition are supported. Through our child sponsorship model, we work with the ultimate goal of creating self-sufficient and empowered families that thrive across generations.
our approach
From a web of POVERTY To a Cycle of Empowerment
trafficking
Orphans
Business Skills Training
POVERTY
Empowered participants mentor others
Loan Pools funded
Income sources developed
Homelessness
Disease
Vulnerability reduced
Debt traps
NEEMA'S
STORY
Neema is driven and resourceful. She is a young, single mom who is raising two girls in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. Through UTST's Economic Empowerment program, she has quadrupled her income by selling products that are in high demand in her neighborhood. To further diversify her income base, she also began to raise pigs and farm vegetables. Neema is now beginning to employ others, is a mentor to other young moms, and her daughters are performing at the top of their classes in school. In Swahili, Neema's name means "grace;" we like to call her Amazing Grace.
Preventing the Effects
of Poverty Through
Economic Empowerment
Extreme poverty creates tragedy in the lives of families around the world:
Homelessness. Child Abandonment. disease. Hunger. Trafficking. Prostitution. Illiteracy. Exploitation. Abuse. Gang activity. Orphans. Debt traps. Theft.
We are preventing that.
Under the Same Tree is empowering families to create sustainable sources of income. In doing so, we are preventing the effects of extreme poverty, setting the next generation up for success, and empowering our entrepreneurs to become agents of change in their own communities. Our empowerment model is holistic, and promotes health emotionally, mentally, spiritually, financially, and physically.