Sikivu is a Kenyan-led mental-wellness companion for East Africa — a clinical outcomes company, not an app company. We measure wellbeing, not downloads. And we’re building the founding team to get there.
One person can start something wonderful. It takes more than one to make it timeless. Sikivu began with Lawrence on his own; he’s since been joined by the clinician who keeps it safe and the creative who gives it a voice.
Lawrence founded Sikivu and still builds most of it — the engineering, the clinical research, the operations, and reading every message that lands in the contact inbox. He started it because the people around him needed somewhere to be heard and had nowhere to put it.
Sharon is a CPB-registered Counsellor. She’s spent over a decade in counselling and psychosocial support across hospital and community settings in Kenya, sitting with people one-to-one and in groups, and delivering evidence-based CBT. She’s also a social researcher — focus groups, in-depth interviews, and the analysis behind them. At Sikivu she reviews the crisis pathway and the words we use when someone is at their lowest.
Gloria is a creative — content, graphic design, photography, and video editing. She’s spent her career helping businesses, organisations, and ministries tell their stories, and she measures the work by whether it actually reaches anyone. At Sikivu she shapes how we look and sound, and helps build the community around it.
Before Sikivu was an app, it was a pattern I kept noticing.
People close to me needed someone to talk to and had nowhere to put it — not a diagnosis, not a prescription, just someone who would listen and keep it to themselves. Therapy cost more than many of them earned in a month. And where I come from, saying you’re struggling is often heard as saying you’re going mad — so most people say nothing.
The ones who did want help carried a second fear. Before opening up, they had to weigh whether the person across from them would hold the secret or pass it around. Many decided it wasn’t worth the risk. They kept the weight, and kept quiet.
One question stayed with me: if the privacy were real, and the safeguards were real, could technology let a person be heard without the fear of being exposed — and give them something useful back?
That question became Sikivu — listening, in Kiswahili. Built to do the one thing those people couldn’t reliably find: to listen, in the language they actually speak, without judgement, and without telling.
— Lawrence Juma, founder
For the people we’re building for, professional care is too scarce, too costly, or too exposing to reach. The need doesn’t disappear when help is out of reach — it just goes unspoken.
That a private, judgement-free companion — grounded in proven techniques and built for how people move between English and Kiswahili — can give someone somewhere to be heard. And that we can measure whether it genuinely helps, rather than assume it does. We’re testing that with real people, and we’ll say plainly whether it holds.
These aren’t open positions yet — they’re the shape of the team we’re building, with funding still ahead of us. We keep expressions of interest on file and come back to them when a role opens. If the mission fits, we want to know you.
Build a privacy-first, offline-capable product. On-device ML, real-time sync, and a crisis path that has to work without a network.
Keep the product safe and evidence-based — crisis thresholds, safe-messaging copy, and our outcome-measurement battery. Our Clinical Advisor leads this work.
Trained community mental-health workers who hold Sikivu Circles and peer-chat safety — the human layer behind the pipeline. Paid, part-time, remote at launch.
Reach East African users with a voice that fits their lives — culturally grounded, Kiswahili-comfortable, free of growth-hacking and urgency.
Turn a Kenyan-led product into a sustainable organisation — NGO and employer pilots, grants, and the day-to-day that keeps a small team moving.
Shape an anxiety-aware product and learn from the people we serve — interface design, and qualitative research with East African users.
We’re building this out as we scale — starting with legal, clinical, and operations, and open to any field you have depth in. An hour of your perspective changes what we build. Advisors give as little or as much time as they can.
If this isn’t you but you know who it might be, please pass it on.
There’s no portal yet — and you’d be writing to Lawrence directly. Send a note: who you are, what you’d work on, and why East African mental health matters to you. A link to your work (GitHub, portfolio, LinkedIn) helps.
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