The Structure

The Ukoo

The Ukoo, the clan, is over everyone: the Strategy and Governance Board, the two directors and the safeguarding committee, and the mission they all serve. Beneath it stand three Lions side by side. Startup Lions came first, in 2015: a German company and its Kenyan sister, Startup Lions Assets Kenya, which holds the campus beside Lake Turkana and runs it. Under it, level with each other, sit Campus Management with the ten campus services, Lions Strength with the community work, the Loropio Girls High School and NAWI, and the volunteers and digital nomads the campus hosts. It also hosts the volunteers and digital nomads who come to give time or to work beside the Lions; the campus houses them, though no paper yet defines a volunteer programme, and Volunteers and Digital Nomads says what is known. Beside it, Learning Lions is the training: Mobile LEAP, BootCamp and the Advanced Track, Darasa Hub, the Career Map, and the women's and men's tracks, TechDada and TechKaka. Digital Lions is the fair trade digital agency where trained Lions work for clients around the world. Learning Lions and Digital Lions grew out of Startup Lions and in a way still sit under it; the papers have never said so in one line, which is why the three stand side by side here. The shared services, Finance, Human Resources, the IT Center and Communication, serve every Lions alike and reach into Learning Lions and Digital Lions as much as into the campus. Ukoo is Kiswahili for the clan or lineage: everyone who grew from one root.

Every box is a door. Startup Lions and Digital Lions open their own websites in a new tab; Learning Lions opens Darasa Hub; the rest open pages here. Orange is Startup Lions and the campus, green is education, yellow is Digital Lions, grey is Lions Strength and the community; dotted boxes are programmes and tools, not bodies. Every page on the portal is listed on How the Campus Is Organised.

The shared services serve every Lions alike. They report to the two directors, not to the Campus Manager; HR and campus management reach into Learning Lions and Digital Lions as well.

Each branch keeps its own colours across the sites: orange for Startup Lions, the campus and this portal; green for everything that teaches; yellow for Digital Lions; grey for Lions Strength and the community.

How the SGB Draws It

The Strategy and Governance Board's own papers draw the same family from the governance side. Its members sign one agreement with five entities together: Learning Lions gUG, Learning Lions in the United States once established, Startup Lions GmbH, Startup Lions Assets Kenya and Lions Strength. The written structure of December 2025 then speaks of "the integrated Learning Lions, Startup Lions Assets Kenya and Lions Strength ecosystem", with Digital and Startup Lions as cooperating entities: one organisation, several legal employers, one board over all of it. The chart below is that picture.

The family is run as one organisation, whatever the legal employer. Direction and accountability sit with the Strategy and Governance Board, the SGB. Two domain boards sit beneath it: the Campus Administration Board for everything campus-based under SLAK, and the Community Programs Board for the community programmes and the school project under Lions Strength. The Safeguarding, Gender and Quality Committee is independent and reports straight to the SGB. The Advisory and Ambassador Board advises and opens doors but makes no decisions.

Day to day, the Operations Director and the Finance Director lead. The Operations Director line-manages the heads of the operational departments and co-chairs the two domain boards with the Finance Director, who leads finance across all the entities. Departments do the work; each has teams for its services.

How the December 2025 structure draws it: who answers to whom. The two directors co-chair both domain boards; the committee is independent and reports to the SGB; the Advisory and Ambassador Board advises and decides nothing.

The naming convention: a board ends in -B, a department in -D, a committee in -C. Team names are written in full.

Governance

Departments and Teams

Who Reports to Whom

1. The SGB receives regular reports from the Operations Director, the Finance Director, both domain boards and the committee.
2. The Operations Director line-manages the heads of Campus Management, IT Center, Training, Community Programs, the school project, Communication and Human Resources.
3. The Finance Director leads the Finance Department and co-leads the Reporting Team with Communication.
4. Campus Management and IT Center answer to the Campus Administration Board; Community Programs and the school project answer to the Community Programs Board. The two directors co-chair both boards and carry their decisions to the SGB.
5. Within Campus Management, branch leads report to the Campus Manager or to one of the management assistants, who also deputise for the Campus Manager.
6. Shared services serve every entity: Finance, Human Resources, IT Center, Communication and the committee.

Three Initiative Clusters

For planning, budgets, performance monitoring and donor reporting, the work is grouped across departments into three clusters.

1. Training and Digital Work Pathways, led by Training and supported by IT Center, Campus Management, Finance, Human Resources and Communication.
2. Campus and Enterprises, led by Campus Management and IT Center under the Campus Administration Board.
3. Community Schools and Programs, led by Community Programs and the school project under the Community Programs Board.

Names That Changed

The structure was written in two rounds. The September 2025 structure named a Campus Management Board, a Community Projects Management Board, a System Administration department of its own and a Gender and Welfare Committee. The December 2025 structure, which this site follows, renamed them the Campus Administration Board, the Community Programs Board, the IT Center Department and the Safeguarding, Gender and Quality Committee, and put the System Admin Team inside IT Center. Staff still use the older names in conversation.