Make Me Smile Kenya is an NGO with ways forward to sustainable development cooperation and was founded in 2008 in Kisumu, western Kenya. To guarantee the sustainability of our work, we involve the structures of the government as well as all relevant actors. This enables the beneficiaries to provide for themselves and their children in the future and to represent their rights themselves.
"We help people to help themselves, for the benefit of the children, because we believe in everybody’s potential."
Our story
With this short story we would like to give you an impression of how Make Me Smile Kenya came into being. Starting as a small children’s home for 10 girls, we now take care of over 34,000 children in western Kenya. With each new milestone, our projects developed step by step and today we follow a sustainable way forward to development cooperation.
A journey into the unknown
Miwani was a sugar town. When the sugar factory collapsed around 2000, the work vanished with it, and the families around it were left without income almost overnight. That was the situation on the ground: not a general, timeless poverty, but a specific collapse and the vulnerability it left behind — hundreds of children among them.
During his stay, friendships are also made with the people of Kenya, including the hairdresser Dan. He tells him a lot about the great poverty and the problems in the country. This year there is also great political unrest, followed by post election violence, which makes everything much worse.
A children’s house is being built
In 2007, Maximilian Ullrich spent time in Miwani. At that time many children there were going without a daily meal. Back in Austria, he began raising money. Irmgard Ullrich joined to raise support in Austria.
Simon Peter, then a pharmacist rooted in Miwani, led the work on the ground from the start — and he leads MMS-K to this day. What started as “let’s talk with the community about a way forward” in 2007 is now Make Me Smile Kenya.
The decision to do more
So yes — Make Me Smile International co-founded Make Me Smile Kenya. Maximilian and Irmgard Ullrich raised the first funds in Austria; Simon Peter built the organisation in Kenya. In 2008, when a Western name in the founding picture was often the price of entry for a grassroots Kenyan initiative, that connection was part of what made the work possible.
The support is being increased. A fish pond and a chicken farm are being built and an agricultural business is being established. In 2012, we choose a sustainable path of development cooperation and set the biggest milestone in our history. Make Me Smile Kenya has been registered as an NGO and Simon, as an excellent manager, will initiate our cooperation with USAID.
Together we are building a network of 69 family caregivers who cared for 3,155 orphans and vulnerable children and young people. Our girls from the children’s house are reintegrated into local families in the spirit of helping them to help themselves and are also supported by family caregivers.
We focus on prevention
After five years of work we realized that sustainable development cooperation is only possible with family planning. First, our experts visit families on a small scale and objectively impart knowledge about contraceptives and reproductive health. Subsequently, we start a cooperation with Aktion Regen and train more than 150 Community Health Workers in family planning, contraception, safe motherhood and HIV prevention and form a network to reach all inhabitants of our project region with this information.
Our concept is recognised and promoted by the Austrian Foreign Ministry through ADA (Austrian Development Agency). This will enable us to start a three-year programme in 2017, which will provide 24,500 people with knowledge and access to family planning. Our aim is to encourage families to make informed decisions about the timing and number of children they have, taking into account the best interests of the child.
Good work is recognised
Our sponsor, USAID (till 2025 as the big worldwide funding cut happened), recognizes our commitment and is increasingly expanding the number of children entrusted to us starting in 2016. Make Me Smile Kenya is awarded by USAID as the best partner organization in Western Kenya. At the end of 2017 we are entrusted with the implementation of the five-year MWENDO program (USAID) and are given responsibility for over 13,300 children.
Within the framework of this program our family caregivers ensure that basic needs such as food, education and health are met. We also promote the psychosocial health of the children and help them to help themselves through savings associations, training courses and the distribution of seeds, so that families can soon meet the needs of their children themselves.
Health for all
A cooperation with Graz University of Technology, the local community and the Ministry of Health of Kisumu County made it possible. Make Me Smile realised the construction of a health centre in an area where people had no access to health care.
It was our first major construction project, which in combination with the Kenyan bureaucracy led to a longer construction process. Since the beginning of 2019, the health centre and all its outbuildings have been in place. In July 2019, the “Angola Health Centre” will go into operation fully equipped. We will enable the start-up for six months and from January 2020 the Ministry of Health took over the running costs. Our aim is to provide free, high-quality health care.
What it means for today
A founding is an event. It happened once, officially in 2008. What matters in 2026 is a different question: who runs this work now, and who controls the money?
Today, MMS-K is Kenyan-led and Kenyan-governed. Its director, its coordinators, its board and its staff are Kenyan. It plans its own programmes, writes its own proposals, and answers to its own community. Make Me Smile International’s role today is fundraising. Across Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Luxembourg, it raises support, makes tax-deductible giving possible, and transfers the funds to MMS-K. MMS-I raises. MMS-K runs.
What happened in 2025 showed it. When a large part of the international funding was cut—a political decision taken far from Kolwa East—MMS-K did not have to become a Kenyan organisation in order to survive. It already was one. The work continued because the people who do it live here, and stayed. The funding leaving did not force a transformation; it removed a layer and revealed what had always been underneath.
This is the quiet architecture beneath ‘MMS-I raises. MMS-K runs.’ Make Me Smile International is the formal fundraising partner—and around it stands something less formal and just as real: a network of people across several countries, held together not by a contract but by the place that shaped them. It is the same thing Kolwa East has always done—drawn people in and kept them—quietly, many times over.
A partner that raises the funds, and a Kenyan team that runs the work: that is the whole of it. Make Me Smile Kenya is a Kenyan organisation, with a partner it is proud of.
Make Me Smile Kenya Team
