Building Cheche Za Nuru a Website Its Team Can Run

Cheche Za Nuru works with children in Kibera, Nairobi. Nuru Scholars keeps them in school and Afya Kwa Wote looks after their health. There is football too, through the Rising Stars league. What drew me to the foundation is that it treats all of this as one piece of work. A child who is fed and well can sit through a lesson (and, I suspect, run a little faster).

I built their website. I'm prouder of the dashboard behind it, though, which visitors never see.

When a small organisation asks for a website, what it seldom says out loud is that it will have to run the thing itself once the developer has gone. It seems too obvious to mention. A site the team can't update starts going stale almost immediately. Six months on it is still announcing last year's event, and funders notice that sort of thing.

Most of my effort therefore went into the admin side. The team logs in and runs the whole site from there. Their stories and photographs live in Supabase, as do the staff profiles and the programme events. Nobody editing them has written a line of code, and I can't think of a good reason they should have to.

The impact figures on the homepage matter most to me. I didn't type them in once and forget about them. The team changes them as the work grows, so the homepage stays honest about what is happening in Kibera.

I measure the project in a fairly unglamorous way, by whether the team is still updating the site without me six months from now. So far they are. Should they start calling me every week, I'd take it that I built the wrong thing, however nice it looks.

For the record, it runs on Next.js and TypeScript, styled with Tailwind, with Supabase holding the content and the photographs. The more interesting decisions were about who holds the keys to what, and the framework hardly came into it.