Wekesa plots bright future for Kenya – on and off the sevens pitch

Seeing Wekesa’s hulking frame – the number 6 emblazoned on his back – running through opponents and smashing into rucks is, win or lose, a staple of Kenya performances on the HSBC SVNS Series this season, but it’s the 24-year-old’s environmental credentials that stand out when he’s at home. 

Wekesa estimates he has planted around 1,000 trees in Kenya to date. 

It all started a few years ago at a national team training camp at a school in Nakuru – a county northwest of Nairobi surrounded by national parks – when he started talking to the school’s staff about what he might do to offset the carbon emissions he felt responsible for as a result of the air travel involved while playing for Kenya at sevens.

“As a sevens player, you travel a lot and when you make just one plane trip it contributes a lot of carbon,” Wekesa said. 

“We were at St Andrew’s Turi school and I was chatting to them about how the rugby team could maybe help plant and look after some trees, and they said we could use some of their land to start a forest, so we did. That was the start of things.”

This forest is now known as the ‘Shujaa Forest’ and numbers around 300 trees, many of which have been planted by the Kenyan sevens team, and the rest by the school’s pupils and staff.

Wekesa and his team-mates have since gone on to plant trees in around 20 locations, mostly in schools where he also delivers educational talks on the importance of combating deforestation. 

“Kenya has had deforestation,” he said. “It is in the news but I don’t think people understand what the impact will be in 20 to 30 years’ time, and that’s why I do education programmes, too.” 

Wekesa funds his tree-planting campaigns himself, drawing on the combination of his allowance and his salary as a professional rugby player. As well as planting trees he’s also put his money towards ending the Kenyan sevens teams’ reliance on single-use plastic water bottles.

“At training we used to drink from 500ml plastic bottles and after training it was just a mess. And I thought, ‘let’s start using reusable bottles’.”

His answer was metal water bottles, now used by both the men’s and women’s national sevens teams, that are emblazoned with the words ‘Play Green with Kevin Wekesa’. 

His eye for a good idea, and for branding, has spread. Kenya’s national tennis federation adopted the same goal of ending the use of plastic water bottles. 

And he has no plans to stop there. One of Wekesa’s next projects is to introduce more environmentally friendly ways for Kenya players to travel to and from training – a project hindered, he says, by the small number of electric vehicles in Kenya. 

Speaking with Wekesa, though, you get the sense that if anyone can make such an ambitious project happen, he can. And that feeling is one that many Kenyan rugby fans are familiar with: with Wekesa, anything feels possible. 

This season, that’s as true on the field, as off it. While Kenya have not featured in the business end of a leg this season – they finished 10th in Dubai and seventh in Cape Town – the omens are good for Kenya to reach a tournament’s latter stages at some stage this season. 

They beat South Africa in Dubai and followed up in Cape Town with wins over Australia and Great Britain.

“It feels like we are starting to gel now,” Wekesa said. “One area we are better in has been physicality. In past seasons we weren’t as physical in defence, but now we try to be physical in defence and attack. 

“We’re also starting to grow our set-piece confidence. In the Challenger series (last year) we didn’t have set-piece confidence, but now we are going for more scrums and lineouts, it’s something we have been building in.”

Kenya’s participation in the Challenger series came after their relegation from the SVNS Series in 2023, after 19 years as a core nation. 

Relegation hit Kenyan rugby hard. The Shujaa Pride – the men’s sevens team – had flown the flag for the sport in Kenya for so long, dishing out bloody noses to established rugby powers on a regular basis and – most cherished of all – winning the Singapore leg of the SVNS Series in 2016.

Promotion from the Challenger, however, was swiftly achieved. Wekesa’s athleticism and power helped Kenya secure second place in the Challenger, paving the way for qualification by May of 2024.

Since then Kenya have focused on getting ready to return to the HSBC SVNS Series. The first step was to get faster, fitter and stronger, a job which fell to Chris Brown – who worked with Kenya a decade ago during the Mike Friday era – and former Shujaa captain Andrew Amonde, now the team’s strength and conditioning coach. 

Amonde was renowned for his physicality on the field, and his abrasive style led Kenya to that Singapore title in 2016, an achievement which is never far from the mind of Wekesa. 

He said: “I must have watched the final [when Kenya beat Fiji 30-7] more than 20 times! It’s something that you are reminded of every day when you go to training as well because there are pictures on the walls of the office in Nairobi and you think you can achieve that one day. If we can continue [as we have been doing], then it’s achievable.”

Wekesa has often been likened to Amonde, but also to Willy Ambaka, a rampaging winger who was sometimes known as ‘the Kenyan Lomu’.

“There are a lot of similarities between Amonde and my game,” Wekesa agreed. “When I was growing up I was told I played like Andrew Amonde and Willy Ambaka. They are two players I look up to. I think it is a compliment to be compared to those two players.” 

One of Wekesa’s team-mates Patrick Odongo Okong’o is also drawing notable comparisons with another Kenyan star – the most famous Kenyan player of all time – Collins Injera.

And not only does Wekesa see the similarity; Injera himself does, too.

“Collins acknowledges that similarity,” Wekesa said. “And Patrick adores Collins as well.”

Odong’o’s try scoring exploits on the Challenger circuit forced people to sit up and take note. He scored 10 tries in the Dubai leg alone, missed Montevideo due to the ill health of his father at the time, but returned for the Munich leg, adding another four tries to his name.

Now on the HSBC SVNS Series he’s scored seven tries across Dubai and Cape Town, and shown valuable defensive qualities at big moments, too.

With this this Kenyan team drawing personnel comparisons with players from the first golden era of Kenyan sevens, being fitter than ever across the board, and this week being able to recall key players Vincent Onyala, 

Tony Omondi and Brian Tanga to the team, Kenya are well placed to make further improvements this weekend in Perth.

They may not have the battle-hardened credentials to take them all the way and match that title from Singapore in 2016 yet, but we have already seen the shoots of their true potential. 

And if that potential is realised, it will not only be another massive step forward for rugby in Kenya, it will raise Wekesa’s platform to promote sustainable causes – and even more trees will go in the ground in Kenya.