Claude jean kandem

Grants & Partnership Manager, Dignitas

The Youth Café is pleased to welcome Claude Jean as a new member of the Advisory Board.

He is a young program advisor with nearly three years of expertise assisting development programs financed by multiple donors.

He holds a law degree from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology as well as a postgraduate diploma in law from the Kenya School of Law.

His background in the civil society sector encompasses offering advocacy and service delivery programs with programmatic assistance. He has backed initiatives in a variety of sectors, including education, the rights of sexual minorities (with an emphasis on intersex people), and labour rights for those who work in unregulated industries.

He founded Maximum Motivation Life (MOTMAX Life) in 2016 and has served as its Chief Mentor since then. A community of young people from different backgrounds, known as MOTMAX is primarily engaged in career counselling, peer counselling, and volunteer student mentoring. In my spare time, I carry out this as a way to give back. I have mentored more than 2,000 kids through MOTMAX in a variety of topics, including goal-setting, discipline, mental health and awareness, and intentional living.

At Dignitas, he is currently in charge of grants and partnerships. Here, he manages a growing pipeline of grants and partnerships by continuously researching pertinent partnership and funding opportunities, overseeing grant cycles across a range of opportunities and partnerships by crafting persuasive grant applications and partnership proposals that are strategically aligned to grant making and partner goals and requirements, and overseeing grant and partner reporting processes in a way that is consistent with Dignitas' values, strategy, and reporting guidelines.

He also assists in directing program reporting by delivering general program reports that incorporate feedback from the Programs Team and MEL and can be used for general updates with a number of stakeholders. He also leads the organizational growth strategy.

He will put his skills to work at The Youth Café, assisting with grant proposal writing, program reporting, and organizing a wide range of additional programmatic activities like training. He has experience extracting information from programs to support strategic choices.

Claude sees himself as a humble leader who can grasp many points of view and effectively communicate with people who do not speak English as their first language. Thanks to his exceptional presentation skills, he can effectively explain complicated technical knowledge to a wide range of stakeholders, including lay and analytical audiences.