How Titus Found Skills, Love and a Future Through the PropelA Program
Titus Njoroge had not expected the PropelA program to change his life so completely.
He hoped the two-year dual apprenticeship course would teach him how to be a plumber. He prayed it might secure him a job at the end of it. But he has not counted on finding confidence, purpose— and love. In the end, it gave him all three.
As a young man who seizes every opportunity with enthusiasm, perhaps Titus shouldn’t have been surprised. In his second year, he won the Kenyan national heats of the WorldSkills competition and will represent his country in the African finals in Zambia later this year. As soon as he graduated in January 2025, Allied Plumbers—one of the oldest and most prestigious firms in the business—offered him a full-time role.
Today, he is a technician on their flagship project: a presidentially backed affordable housing scheme bringing new homes to 10,000 residents in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest informal settlement.
But life didn’t always look this promising.
Titus grew up in a highland village outside Nairobi. His family was poor—so poor that lunch was a luxury. Sometimes, there was no food at all. On such days, his parents would set a pot on the charcoal stove and pretend they were cooking, hoping their children would fall asleep before realizing the truth.
“They didn’t want to tell us there was no food,” Titus recalls. “They said the food was being prepared, but they were literally just boiling water.”
School wasn’t any better. Teachers wielded the cane; bullying was rife. Still, it was here that Titus’s dreams began. His school had no running water— students brought their own to drink, clean the floors and flush toilets. He decided to fix that problem someday.
A strong student, Titus worked hard—but one day, his aspirations were dealt a cruel blow. Unable to afford fees for all three of their sons, his parents asked him to leave school and get a job so his brothers could continue their education. It was a crushing moment.
“It was hard to understand at first — ‘Why me?’” he says. “Why is it me that has to stop my education? Did I not perform well?” But with time I came to understand. It was hard keeping all of us in school.”
Titus took a job in a hardware shop and handed most of his monthly wage of about 95 Euros to his parents to help pay his brothers’ fees. To supplement his income, he herded cows in the evenings. Inspired by the plumbers who came through the shop, he saved up what was left of his salary for a course of his own. An uncle helped make up the shortfall, and he enrolled in a two-year plumbing course.
It should have been a fresh start. But when he started work on a hospital construction site in a Nairobi satellite town, he quickly realized the course hadn’t prepared him for the real world. He made mistakes. His confidence crumbled.
Then he heard about PropelA. Backed by the Hilti Foundation, the program adapts the Swiss dual vocational model to Kenya, blending classroom theory with three weeks a month of hands-on experience. It was 2021 and the project had not yet formally launched. But the Swiss experts who had flown to Kenya to train local instructors needed volunteer trainees to test the model. Titus didn’t hesitate and would eventually enroll in PropelA’s first cohort, which graduated in January 2025.
What he found amazed him.
While his earlier course had been almost entirely theoretical, PropelA taught him to solve real-world problems. He trained with Allied Plumbers, one of over 40 companies that partnered with the program to offer stipends, mentorship and apprenticeships. One week each month was spent in PropelA’s well-equipped workshops, where he could revisit complex tasks under expert supervision.
“There is no plumbing task I can't now perform,” he says. “If I didn’t understand something on site, I could go practice on it in the lab with my teachers.”
His supervisors quickly saw his value and because of that his apprenticeship evolved into a full-time technician’s job.
“When I graduated from my first course I had zero skills,” he said. “I was very green. The PropelA program gave me both theoretical knowledge and hands-on skills. That’s what makes it stand out.”
But PropelA didn’t just give Titus a trade—it gave him Lucy.
She was a fellow student who caught his eye across the workshop plumbing boards. PropelA helped her, too: after graduation, she landed a job with Davis & Shirtliff, East Africa’s leading supplier of water and energy equipment. The pair have since moved into a small house together in the hills northwest of Nairobi. It is a long commute, but the air is clean, there are chickens in the yard and time for long romantic walks in the countryside at weekends.
For Titus, life now holds the security and hope that once seemed out of reach.
“If I had stuck with the Kenyan curriculum, it would have taken me ten years to get where I am today,” he says. “My biggest hope is that the Kenyan curriculum will now change so that this kind of apprenticeship model becomes the norm.”
That may take time. Today, only around 6 percent of Kenyan youth aged 15–24 are enrolled in vocational training programs—far too few to meet the country’s growing demand for skilled workers.
Titus knows how much he has gained—and how far he has come. Now he wants more young Kenyans to have the same chance to prove what they can do.