In November 2023, thousands of leaders from universities, companies, and development agencies gathered in Nairobi to attend Kenya Innovation Week. The city that launched a slew of successful startups plays host to a thriving innovation sector, with a pipeline of supportive entrepreneurial platforms, innovation prizes, and government policies.
But the experience of one such startup, Conscious Kenya, a holistic wellness platform founded by Narissa Allibhai and Edgar Kimathi, illustrates the challenges for spiritual innovators. First, capital flows to spiritual innovators far less than to other sectors. Second, the systems to distribute and scale new ventures are few, as are the opportunities for leadership development, peer networks, and mentorship.
Spiritual innovators frequently respond to their own experience of a need, and was true for Allibhai. After losing her childhood best friend to cancer in 2017, she was lost in grief. Her search for practices to help process her loss led her to sound healing, an ancient healing modality that activates the body’s parasympathetic nervous system through different sound frequencies. She delved deep into the practice, picking up the bansuri, a bamboo flute, and working with singing bowls. “Soon, I wanted to share it with others, because it was what helped me,” she explains.
She co-created Conscious Kenya as a directory to help users find alternative therapists, healers, and teachers, as well as a variety of wellness products from across the country. Ironically, while trying to connect practitioners and seekers, Conscious Kenya finds itself with its own distribution challenge. By choosing the frame of wellness, the directory is aligned with a growing global industry, but often at odds with local religious institutions. Like many peers, Kimathi and Allibhai straddle two worlds with competing logics. For example, how does one maintain ethical commitments while facing real economic questions? “Pricing! What is pricing?!” exclaims Allibhai. “How do you know what feels right?”
To make the numbers work, many innovators drawn to the healing arts now need to master marketing and social media influencing. Some have created secondary businesses to keep money and mission separate, such as a group of Transcendental Meditation leaders who set up a cybercafe in Nairobi. Conscious Kenya hopes to build cooperative structures that undo the individualizing influence of capitalism, setting up a bartering system among healing practitioners, as one possibility. But what support structure exists for leaders like Allibhai and Kimathi? How might they share their learnings and struggles with other convenors and platform creators, or even expand across Africa, as is their dream?
So during Kenya Innovation Week, Conscious Kenya hosted its own gathering of innovators, the Feel the Joy Festival. There were no prizes, innovation pipelines, or government policies – but a rich shared imagination for a revitalized landscape of community, spirituality, and healing.
Discover Additional Spiritual Innovation Case Studies
Perhaps "innovation" isn't the word; it's better to talk about transformation. Spiritualities are changing, which is natural. Everything changes over time.
