Doing Good Through Deliberate Partnership: The I&M Foundation Story

There is a version of corporate social responsibility in Kenya that is all packaging. A tree planted for a photo. A cheque was handed over at a gala. A press release about how many lives were “touched.” And after that, everything goes silent. Life goes back to normal. No real lives touched, but imaginary ones. And then there is the I&M Foundation, which, five years into its work, has quietly built one of the more credible models for what institutional philanthropy can actually look like when it decides to be serious about it.

The Foundation was established in 2020 as the philanthropic arm of I&M Bank Group, and it has operated from the beginning on a straightforward financial commitment: 2 percent of I&M Bank Kenya’s annual profit before tax goes directly to funding social investment programmes. This is probably the only institution that does this in the region, not only in Kenya.

But let us face the truth, the money, on its own, does not explain why the Foundation’s work is worth paying attention to. Here is how:

A Philosophy Built on Partnership

The Foundation does not operate in the field. It does not run schools, manage forests, or employ youth trainers. Its stated implementation philosophy is to work through partners, registered organisations with good governance structures, demonstrated track records, and deep community roots. The Foundation’s role is explicitly catalytic: to identify where existing efforts are working, and to amplify them.

That is a harder model to execute than it sounds. It requires institutional humility that most funders, corporate or otherwise, struggle to sustain. It requires genuine due diligence rather than relationship-based grant-making. And it requires accepting that your name will often appear in small font, beneath the organisations that did the actual work on the ground.

I&M Foundation appears to have accepted that trade-off, and the results, particularly across its four thematic pillars of environmental conservation, education and skills development, economic empowerment, and enabling giving, are worth examining closely.

Forests, Livelihoods, and the Long Game in Nairobi

Project Imarisha Ngong Forest is the Foundation’s flagship environmental initiative, a multi-year restoration effort carried out in partnership with the Kenya Forest Service. The Foundation has committed over KES 160 million to the project, a figure that reflects not just ecological ambition but an understanding that meaningful conservation requires sustained, not episodic, investment.

What distinguishes this initiative is not the scale of the financial commitment alone, but the way it integrates livelihood creation into the conservation mandate. Residents from informal settlements in Kibera and Dagoretti have been engaged in paid restoration work, turning what could have been a pure conservation narrative into something with tangible economic consequences for people who live in the shadow of a forest that was disappearing around them.

On the Kenyan coast, the Foundation’s partnership with A Rocha Kenya has embedded environmental education into school-level programming around Arabuko Sokoke Forest in Kilifi County. 20 primary schools have been mobilised, students and youth drawn into wildlife clubs, and families provided with seedlings to plant in their homes and communities. It is the kind of patient institution-building — cultivating the habits and knowledge of conservation in children before they become adults who make land-use decisions, that rarely makes headlines but genuinely shapes the long arc of environmental outcomes.

The Foundation’s partnership with the Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF), formalised in 2020 with an investment of over KES 50 million across three years, extended this work to 172 learning institutions across Narok and Kilifi counties. The programme combined tree planting with clean energy adoption, including energy-saving jikos and solar lighting, alongside sustainable waste management infrastructure. The projected reach covered over 5,000 households, families, not just students, in communities where charcoal burning, land degradation, and soil erosion remained live economic and ecological threats.

At the same time, between 7th and 18th October 2025, the I&M Foundation, through its Environment Conservation Program, undertook a large-scale restoration of degraded mangrove areas within the Mwache Block of Mwatsumbo Forest. Delivered in partnership with Furaha & Baraka Farms as the implementing partner and the Mwatsumbo Community Forest Association (CFA), the project restored 60 hectares of mangrove forest through the planting of 500,000 seedlings. Beyond the impressive scale, however, the true significance of the initiative lies in how it was executed, and what it signals for the future of conservation in Kenya.