Associate Professor Violet Naanyu says she was born in a home birth in Kajiado County, where there was only one person with a vehicle in the entire village who would be called upon in an emergency. Someone was sent to fetch that person, but by the time they returned, she was already born. That’s the first fact in her story: life beginning far from any reliable system, in a place where even an emergency depended on one vehicle and a delayed response.
Naanyu was the fifth of six children born to a peasant farmer and a high school clerk. She grew up in a household where paying school fees was a constant struggle. Her parents struggled even to pay her school fees, she said, but she wanted a better life for herself. The hierarchy was plain enough. Some children get a runway; others get a fight just to stay in school.
Who Gets Left Waiting
Her early schooling followed the 7-4-2-3 system. She began in a church-based school that helped Maasai girls avoid circumcision and early marriage. Later, she joined Alliance Girls’ High School through a policy that placed top students from across the country into national schools. She said her marks were not among the best nationwide, but she was the best in her school, and that is how she ended up at Alliance. The gate opened, but only a little, and only for those who could climb high enough inside a broken system.
At Alliance, she met students from diverse backgrounds, which sharpened her sense of cultural identity. She kept hearing that the Maasai are a very cultural people, and it got stuck in her head so much that when they asked what she wanted to study in university, she decided she wanted something to do with culture. She had qualified for law at the University of Nairobi but chose anthropology at Moi University. Her turning point came in her final year when a visiting lecturer introduced medical anthropology. He taught that if one was to have an intervention, they needed to think about who is affected, how they are affected, and how it connects to their culture. She said immediately she knew this was what she wanted to do.
Her first job was with a Swedish team studying pit latrine sanitation in Eldoret. They needed young anthropologists to help do interviews, run observations and collect data, and one of her professors recommended her. That became her first job. She was given a red bicycle and assigned to observe ten households sharing a latrine, bathroom and borehole. At first she was a stranger to the households she was studying, but over time she became like family to them. The work was intimate, local, and grounded in the daily grind of shared infrastructure.
What Community Work Actually Looks Like
Naanyu later joined Moi University as a graduate assistant and won a scholarship to study medical anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. When she returned to Kenya, HIV/AIDS was ravaging the country. Through a partnership between Moi and Indiana University, she met Professor Joe Mamlin, who was building AMPATH, a program to fight HIV in western Kenya. He came to her and said, “I’ve been told you’re the only social scientist in the College of Health Sciences and would like us to work on HIV and a grant proposal together.”
At first she hesitated because she had already been accepted for a PhD in London, where she planned to study infertility, and her husband was excited because he could accompany her and receive a work permit. Mamlin persisted. She quoted him as saying, “I think you’ll change your mind. We are burying 850 Kenyans every day.” He offered her the chance to pursue her PhD through Indiana while working with AMPATH. She eventually turned down her London funding. She said, “I told them, I think I should go back home to Eldoret and apply to Indiana University, and you should fund the two master’s students.”
Her decision coincided with a personal crisis. Her seven-year-old daughter lost her hearing. After seeking treatment in Kenya, they travelled to Indiana University’s Riley Children’s Hospital, where her daughter eventually received a cochlear implant. She said the same academic network that had drawn her into HIV research helped facilitate the trip. The machinery of global academia moved when it wanted to. Ordinary care still had to fight for a place.
She enrolled at Indiana University for a PhD in sociology. She said it was not easy. She had to work many hours, do housekeeping, do assignments at night, make sure the children were okay and still take care of classes assigned to her by her professor. Life grew harder when her marriage ended before she completed her doctorate. She returned to Eldoret with her daughters, then aged 13 and 8. She said it was challenging, that she cried many nights, but kept speaking to herself, saying, “I am a finisher.” In May 2009, she graduated in the US but chose to return home. She said staying in America would make her just another professor, while at home she would be at the top and very much needed.
Research, Funding, and the Gatekeepers
Her role expanded as partnerships grew to include 20 universities. She joined an ethics review committee, ensuring research met standards. She said that at first she didn’t know much about ethics, but people would come to her with questions about the ethical considerations in their projects. That’s when she realised she didn’t know enough, so during COVID-19, she went back to school to pursue a master’s degree in global bioethics.
Naanyu said research is about engaging communities as partners. She said patients, caregivers, health workers and local leaders are involved not only as research participants, but as partners in identifying problems, shaping interventions and evaluating whether they work. That philosophy led her to establish the AMPATH Qualitative Research Core in 2018.
Her work has spanned cancer, hypertension, diabetes and maternal health, but her most recognised contributions remain in HIV research. AMPATH has reached more than a million Kenyans through home-based testing, provided care to 11,000 people living with HIV, and reduced mother-to-child transmission to 4.2 percent. Those numbers matter because they show what organized care can do when it actually reaches people instead of just talking at them from above.
Naanyu said impact is not only about policy. She said, “If you can change something as simple as patient flow, maybe by just sorting out a waiting bay, that is a big score for me.” With about 140 peer-reviewed publications, she now focuses on mentorship. She said someone who helps you reflect on where you are, what your skill set is, and guides you to resources can really help you grow, and that letting someone else learn from her so they avoid the holes is the best way to leave a legacy.
She said Kenya is improving in responding to health problems with appropriate research, but funding remains a challenge. She said, “There’s a lot of good talk, but where the rubber meets the road, I don’t think we are doing enough. But when we start scratching our back the right way, it’s easier for external funders to come in and help us.” That’s the old arrangement in plain language: local need, thin support, and outside money waiting to decide what gets done.
If given unlimited funding, she said she would invest in maternal vaccines. She said, “There are a lot of illnesses and baby deaths that can be prevented simply by pregnant women getting a vaccine. I would like to spend time answering questions within that space and translating the findings into practical change.” She also said her pride in her Maasai heritage remains strong. She said, “I am very proud to be a Maasai woman. I was raised there, my parents still live there, and that’s why I plan to go back and work there.”