Nairobi Women’s Representative Esther Passaris burst into the limelight through Adopt-A-Light, the project that took up the weighty and now controversial task of lighting up Nairobi streets. As the company implemented its vision, Nairobi by night transformed. Adopt-A-Light put up street lighting on major roads, business areas and residential neighbourhoods, paying particular attention to the slums. As the company transformed the city’s lighting, proceeds from the venture went a long way in rehabilitating street children.
As a businesswoman, philanthropist and now a politician, passion is the force that drives Esther Passaris. The newly elected Nairobi County Woman Representative joined the National Assembly in 2017 after winning the seat on an Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party ticket, having vied for the same seat unsuccessfully in 2013. But it is the Adopt-A-Light initiative that put Passaris in the limelight as an entrepreneur, earning her the nickname ‘Mama Taa’.
The entrepreneur got the innovative idea for the street-lighting initiative from South Africa. The plan was to light up Nairobi by putting up more street lights, using the poles to hold advertising billboards, which would generate revenue for maintaining the lights. When she approached Nairobi city authorities to float the idea, she was met
with the standard response: ‘No money’.
Never a quitter, Passaris forged ahead to implement the idea using her own money. She partnered with the City Council of Nairobi, whose role would be to find advertisers, but she ended up installing and maintaining the lights herself, at great personal cost. “My house and I have a funny relationship. One minute it’s mine, the next minute it’s the bank’s. Each time I need money for business it becomes the bank’s house.” Passaris’ biggest challenge in implementing the concept was that she did not know how the street-lighting system worked. She had to fly City Council engineers to South Africa to learn the concept before Adopt-A-Light was launched. She fondly recalls
the day they installed the lights in the slums. “We saw kids playing in the evening and studying under the lights. People were punching their mabati roofs to get light into their houses.”
As Adopt-A-Light grew and revenue from the advertisements streamed in, the philanthropist in Passaris blossomed. She started rehabilitating street boys and absorbing them into the firm, thus creating jobs and reducing crime in the lit-up rough neighbourhoods.“If there is a woman who wasn’t raped because the path was lit or a car accident that didn’t happen because of the lighting, I am happy,” she says. She recalls a motorist’s words: “Passaris, since you lit up Waiyaki Way, there have been no accidents”. She went on to win numerous awards for Adopt-A-Light, including the Presidential Order of the Grand Warrior of Kenya, the United Nations Habitat Award and the Umeme (Kiswahili for electricity) Achievement Award. With few businesswomen to look up to, Passaris’ mentors were mostly men. “I have a friend, a retired judge, who is my mentor.”
Adopt-A-Light hit the headwinds at the peak of its success before Passaris realised her ambition to get it listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange. An advertisers’ association took Passaris to court, claiming that the City Council ought to have invited bids for the street lighting project. “It was supposed to be a partnership, but you can only invoke the tender process if you have the budget as a county, form a tender committee and then advertise. There was no budget for this and the City Council never paid me a cent,” she says. Adopt-A-Light was cast as monopolistic. Her adversaries charged that the project’s mode of implementation was unfair and undermined the county’s revenue collection. “I didn’t understand what was happening. On the one hand, I was getting a State commendation; on the other hand, I was being told to get out.”
At the time of this interview, Passaris shared that she was embroiled in arbitration with Nairobi County but was upbeat that justice would prevail. Court orders to stop the City Council from interfering with Adopt-A-Light proved futile. Having borrowed heavily to light up Thika Road, Passaris says the case has been difficult and demoralising. “Everyone has that spirit that drives them and makes them wake up every morning. Eventually, that spirit becomes your children because you want them to have a better world, but the litigation, somehow, destroyed my spirit,” she admits.
She was, however, awarded KES 35 million by the High Court stemming from a dispute with Equity Bank on the execution of an advertising contract agreement entered by the two parties. The single parent of two says she wants to be the best mother possible. “When I came up with Adopt-A-Light, the idea was to light up Nairobi. It’s a shame I couldn’t continue rehabilitating street boys.” Everyone has that spirit that drives them and makes them wake up every morning. Eventually, that spirit becomes your children because you want them to have a better world Litigation affected Adopt-A-Light financially, resulting in staff layoffs. Passaris hired a new managing director whom she mandated to grow the business and keep it alive. “This company had a vision – to light up Kenya when the sun sets. The vision is still alive. We brought the lights to the slums and I’m happy even if I’m not the one doing it.”
As things went wrong with the Judiciary, the police and the anti-corruption agency, Passaris shares that she realised that the institutions may not have been independent. She thought it was because of poor representation of women in Parliament that the House did nothing to save a project that touched the lives of vulnerable people, hence her bid to vie for the Nairobi’s Woman Rep position.
She first vied unsuccessfully for the position in the 2013 General Elections, then went on to win on her second go at it in the August 2017 elections. Passaris blames tribalism and corruption for killing the Adopt-A-Light dream. “You can’t work with people who don’t want to work with you. How do you work around it without losing your soul and your principles?”
She won’t give up, though. “One should try as much as possible to get the system to work because that is the only way we can save this generation of entrepreneurs, for without them, the country can never go forward.” She is still determined to continue lighting the city, and hopes to one day get Adopt-A-Light listed on the stock exchange.
Words of Wisdom
“As women we are advancing. It’s something we’re working towards; it’s not being handed to us.”
“Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.”
“Protect your idea if it is new.”
“Being your own boss means working harder than everyone else. You work twice as hard, but you get 10 times the reward.”
“Reward yourself; don’t lose your life because of business.”
“Whatever you do, give back to society and the environment. Don’t destroy them for the next generation.”
“There’s no place like home; let’s make Kenya a better place.”
In her early fifties, Passaris reflects on the next decade. “Do I take a second stab at politics or be a social entrepreneur?” She opted to take a chance once again at politics, and in 2016 announced her intention to vie for the Nairobi gubernatorial seat in Kenya’s 2017 General Elections. She later gave this up and opted to vie for the Woman Representative seat.
Born to a Greek father and a half-Kikuyu-half-Boer mother, Passaris grew up with three sisters and one brother. Her father was a naval architect in Mombasa. She attended the Aga Khan Primary School and Star of the Sea High School. A trained hotelier who regards herself as a graduate of “the school of experience”, Passaris worked for a chain of hotels in Mombasa and undertook a two-year in-house training programme. “I’ve done courses here and there,” she says, including a management course at Strathmore University in Nairobi and a hotel course in Switzerland.
During her stint in the hospitality industry, Passaris noticed roadblocks to women’s professional advancement. They could not get beyond the front office or banqueting, hence her quest to be her own boss. “If I could not be general manager or managing director, I figured I might as well venture out,” she says.
She left for Nairobi in 1989 and worked as a salesperson; at some point she was the Group Marketing Manager at Africa Air Rescue (AAR). It was during her period in sales that a business opportunity beckoned. She noticed that the quality of promotional material they were getting was low. With this in mind, she set forth to bridge the gap. Her first client was Coca Cola, who contracted Passaris to supply high quality T-shirts for the company. As a salesperson on commission, Passaris felt she was underpaid. She quit the job to register Sharper Images Company and hired some 300 workers, most of them involved in tailoring and printing. She employed deaf people to empower them
financially, emerging as a social entrepreneur by giving back to society.
Sharper Images won a couple of awards, including the 2005 Guinness Stout Effort Award for employing deaf people, but its success was short-lived. It could not compete with low-priced imported T-shirts and the business closed after 15 years. Passaris took time off work to look after her children, as “it was difficult to balance the two”. They had to be old enough for her to get back into business, which happened when she ventured back into entrepreneurship to start Adopt-A-Light. Even then, she put her children first. However, if she had to choose between a big contract meeting and watching a child’s school play, “I would most likely go for the meeting and get a video man to record the play. I can get home and watch it then compensate with a present the next day,” she says.
Once when her child was injured by a nail, Passaris was busy and unreachable. The little girl asked the driver to take her to hospital. “The next day she came to tell me how she was hurt, and finished with, and I quote: ‘My mother was too busy’. I’ve heard the story every single time I do something wrong. You need to be strong to take the blows. You can never be 100 per centperfect. Just accept you’re human.”
Passaris’ son is in his late teens, and her daughter is in her early twenties. This gives her some time to indulge. “I read lots of books, fast and pray, fly out for a holiday, relax and have fun. However, I’m big on spending time with my family. I even live with my grandmother,” she says. The woman, who describes herself as ‘very spiritual’, meditates when she wakes up and works out in the gym before breakfast. Prior to becoming Woman Rep, she typically spent time in her study before heading to the office, where the fight to save her embattled company raged on. “Life isn’t
easy; business is not easy. The distance between you and success is to always have a pick-me-up. You must be able to bounce back.” Passaris is philosophical about her predicament.
“You can read all the motivational books available, kick yourself 100 times to do X or Y, but I believe there’s a right time for everything.” She lives by the notion that everything happens for a reason, and adds, “I take every day as it comes, waiting for the right time and the right thing to happen.”
Despite the challenges she has experienced, she maintains, “They can take the business, destroy me emotionally, but nothing takes away the pride of having lit up Nairobi.”