Co-Founder and Life Coach Hamisi Ogaya — known to those who know him best as Gaga — grew up in Mukuru Kayaba, one of Nairobi's most challenging informal settlements. Raised by his elder sister from the age of five, he knew from an early age what it meant to face real hardship. Most mornings, breakfast was thin porridge, and sometimes nothing. He walked eight miles to school and eight miles home every day, through mud and rain, with books that arrived wet and a determination that arrived dry.

But there was football. On rocky, bare fields in Mukuru, Hamisi and his friends crafted balls from polythene bags tied with plastic string and played barefoot from dawn until dark. It was not just recreation. It was refuge, the one place where the weight of circumstance lifted, where a boy with nothing could run, compete, and feel fully alive.

That discovery, that sport can carry a child through their hardest seasons, never left him.

In 1999, a football tournament changed everything. A mentor saw potential where others saw only a slum kid with a makeshift ball. That encounter reoriented Hamisi's entire life. What followed was a journey no one in Mukuru Kayaba could have predicted: professional coaching for Nairobi City Stars, a UEFA B Licence earned in Germany, a Master's in Global Leadership and Community Development, and a platform to inspire youth and leaders globally. In 2012, alongside a team of dedicated athletes and community builders, Hamisi co-founded Sports Aid Africa, driven by one unwavering conviction: that the boy he once was deserved better, and so does every child still living that same story.