What is our biggest enemy?

“What is our biggest enemy?” asks Jarvis Kasindi, our videographer, to a classroom of students at Seed of Hope.

It’s the kind of question that invites a long list of answers. In communities facing poverty and inequality, we might expect him to talk about unemployment, violence, school dropout or crime. Instead, he gives a much simpler answer.

“Hunger.”

It is not the answer most people expect, but it reveals something important about how change really happens. Because while the challenges facing young people are complex, many of the things that pull them away from the futures they hope for are rooted in something painfully ordinary. When young people don’t have enough to eat, everything else becomes harder. Concentration suffers. Hope becomes fragile. Desperation grows. The pressure to survive today can begin to crowd out any vision for tomorrow.

That pressure can take many forms. Young people may drop out of school. They may become vulnerable to exploitation or transactional sexual relationships. They may become involved in crime or simply lose confidence in the possibility of a different future. Not because they lack potential, but because the burdens they carry become too heavy.

This is something our partners understand deeply.

At Seed of Hope in Nairobi, young people arrive with stories that are rarely simple. Some have experienced violence or trauma. Others have dropped out of school or are trying to continue their education while raising children of their own. Each young person comes with different experiences and different needs, and the team know that no programme can ever anticipate every challenge that life will bring.

Yet beneath this complexity lies a remarkably simple conviction. People flourish when they have what they need.

That belief shapes everything about Seed of Hope’s approach. The vocational training centre is about much more than learning practical skills. It is a place of belonging and community, where life skills are developed alongside vocational ones and where support is provided with the understanding that young people are more than the difficulties they have faced.

Sometimes that support means counselling. Sometimes it means childcare for a young mother trying to continue her studies. Sometimes it means menstrual health packs that ensure young women do not miss class. Sometimes it means emergency assistance when illness, bereavement or flooding threaten to derail someone’s progress.

And sometimes it simply means making sure there is food.

It is tempting to see these things as additions to the real work, but organisations like Seed of Hope know that these things are the work. Because it is difficult to think about education when you’re hungry, difficult to plan for the future when you are overwhelmed, and difficult to realise your potential when you are carrying life’s burdens alone.

As Mary Mwangi puts it, “We celebrate each and every person and recognise the obstacles so that their potential can be met.”

That spirit runs through all of One World Together’s partners. They do not define people by their problems, nor do they assume that transformation comes from grand interventions or complicated solutions. Instead, they recognise that human beings are full of possibility, and that the most powerful thing we can do is help create the conditions in which that possibility can flourish.

This is why flexible, regular support matters so much. Life doesn’t unfold according to project plans. Crises rarely wait for the next grant cycle. Communities need the freedom to respond to the realities they encounter, whether that means helping someone through a family emergency, providing a meal, or simply making sure that support is there when it is needed most.

The impact of that approach is visible. Across Kenya, around 68% of vocational training students complete their studies. At Seed of Hope, an extraordinary 97% do. Behind that number lie hundreds of decisions, conversations and acts of care that rarely appear in reports. A meal shared. A listening ear. A childcare voucher. Support through a difficult season. Someone saying, in countless different ways, “We’ll walk through this with you.”

That is what solidarity really looks like. Not having all the answers, but ensuring that people have what they need to discover their own strength and realise their own potential.

Jarvis was right. One of our biggest enemies really is hunger.

Not because it is the only challenge people face. But because when the most basic needs go unmet, despair begins to take root. And because when those needs are met, something else becomes possible.

Hope.

A £5.28 monthly donation – not much more than a coffee – is enough to provide one student at SEED of Hope a counselling session. £10.36 would provide warm and nutritious meals. But the most powerful aspect to your Solidarity Fund donation is its flexibility, allowing Florence and Mary to allocate it to whatever it is that a student needs in the moment. That’s solidarity.