"The Kenyan café that helps fight discrimination against deaf people"

Tucked behind a non-descript gate in an affluent neighbourhood of Kenya's capital, Nairobi, is a social experiment that points the way to how the prospects of deaf people can be transformed. By employing deaf staff, who have faced discrimination in almost every aspect of their lives, the Pallet Cafe shows how integration can work...But apart from that, this could easily be mistaken for any other upmarket café, with people tapping away on their laptops, between sipping a latte or tucking into delicious plates of food...

Edward Kamande, who joined the staff soon after Pallet Cafe opened in 2019, started work as a waiter but is now the manager. The 26-year-old says the founder, businessman Feisal Hussein, "took a chance on me. He saw that I had something." The entrepreneur, a former aid worker, wanted to open a place that would not only serve great dishes, like eggs Benedict and shakshuka (a spicy North African egg dish), but also back disabled people and get them into work. "My vision was to support the deaf community," he says of his business which now has three branches. At this branch - in Lavington - more than 30 of the 40 staff are either hearing impaired or deaf...

According to Mr Kamande, the biggest obstacle that deaf people face in Kenya is getting the chance to work in the first place. "There are so many deaf people who don't have job opportunities," he says. It is thought there are at least 600,000 deaf people in the country, and even though discrimination on the grounds of disability is outlawed in the constitution, they continue to face huge obstacles around access to healthcare, education and employment.