Harvard grad returns to Kenya with plan to help teens thrive
This is one in a series of profiles showcasing some of Harvard’s stellar graduates. When Tom Osborn arrived at Harvard as a first-year from Kenya, he’d already been named one of Forbes Magazine’s top 30 under 30 Social Entrepreneurs for a startup he’d launched back home. A year later, personal events and a couple of classes had spurred Osborn to change his concentration from economics to psychology. As he graduates this spring, he’s already developed a successful mental health intervention for teens in Kenya called Shamiri (Swahili for “thrive”). “I grew up in a small farming village where the emphasis was on everyone doing something to help the community and each other,” he said. Osborn did this in a big way in high school when he founded a company that provides a clean fuel alternative for cookstoves, a common mode of preparing food in Africa, after his mother had fallen ill with a respiratory...