Not many of us had heard of the name Isaya Yunge. And so, when he began appearing across Kenyan social media in August 2026, a lot of curiosity arose. The Tanzanian technology entrepreneur had suddenly become a household name in Kenya after his traditional engagement to Charlene Ruto, daughter of President William Ruto.
But there is an important part of Yunge’s story that can easily get lost behind the high profile relationship. Long before he became known as Charlene Ruto’s fiancé, Yunge had already built a remarkable career around technology, education and youth empowerment.
At 17, he was speaking at a G8 summit in Germany. He had worked with UNICEF as a youth representative, founded a platform designed to help African students find scholarships, earned international recognition and, in 2018, received the Queen’s Young Leader Award. His journey began far away from the corridors of power.
Who is Isaya Yunge?
Born on March 23, 1990, in Mwanza, Tanzania, Isaya Yunge is a technology entrepreneur and social innovator. He is best known for his work through SomaApp, a technology platform created to help African students discover scholarship and education opportunities.
His career however, did not begin in technology, but with a childhood in which education was not guaranteed.
Growing up in Mwanza
Yunge’s early years were marked by considerable instability.
According to profiles of his life, his parents divorced when he was young, and he subsequently moved between foster homes. He entered primary school later than many children his age and, before beginning school, spent time herding animals while other children were already in classrooms.
Yet education remained central to the future he imagined for himself.
Growing up in Mwanza, a city on the shores of Lake Victoria, Yunge also encountered children living on the streets. Instead of simply observing their circumstances, he began trying to help. While still in secondary school, he spent some of his free time teaching street connected children basic mathematics and English – an experience that would eventually shape the direction of his career.
At 16, he put street children on radio
One of the more unusual chapters in Yunge’s early life came when he was just 16. Through the Sauti ya Watoto Club, he persuaded Radio Free Africa to create a radio segment that would allow street children to speak about their experiences.
The idea was simple but powerful: instead of allowing street children to remain invisible, give them a platform to tell their own stories and help the wider public understand their lives.
The programme attracted the attention and support of UNICEF and continued for several years, subsequently being the door that would open up bigger opportunities for Yunge.
At 17, Yunge spoke at the G8 Summit
In 2007, Yunge was selected as a UNICEF Africa Youth Ambassador and became involved in the Junior 8 process, a youth forum connected to the G8 Summit. He was just 17.
That took him from Mwanza to Germany, where young people were given an opportunity to engage with some of the world’s most powerful political leaders and discuss issues affecting their generation.
Yunge subsequently became known for his participation in the 2007 G8 process in Germany, an experience that gave him an unusually early introduction to international leadership and policy discussions. It was a remarkable progression for a teenager whose own early education had been uncertain.
And it would not be his last encounter with the international stage.
The problem that led to SomaApp
Yunge’s next major chapter began during his university years at the Institute of Finance Management in Tanzania where he began collecting information about scholarships, conferences, workshops and other opportunities and sharing them with fellow students.
At first, the process was relatively informal.
He would find opportunities and circulate the information through student networks and WhatsApp groups. But as he interacted with more students, he noticed a bigger problem. Many young Africans wanted to continue their education but struggled to find information about scholarships and other forms of funding. Even when opportunities existed, students often did not know where to look or how to navigate the application process.
Yunge saw an opportunity to turn what he was already doing manually into a technology solution, and that idea became SomaApp.
The challenge of finding education funding remains relevant today, with programmes such as the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program offering fully funded opportunities to eligible young Africans. Here is a guide on how to apply for the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, who is eligible and the universities involved.
What is SomaApp?
SomaApp – “soma” being the Swahili word for “study” – was designed to connect students with scholarship opportunities.
The platform sought to make education funding easier to discover by bringing scholarship information into one place and helping students navigate opportunities that they might otherwise never encounter. For Yunge, the idea was closely connected to his own experience.
He had grown up seeing education as a pathway out of poverty. Now he was using technology to try to make that pathway more accessible to other young people.
Ashoka, which recognised Yunge as a Fellow, describes his work as connecting underprivileged African students to advanced level education by opening up education funding resources that had previously been difficult for them to access. By 2018, the initiative had attracted significant international attention. Ashoka reported that SomaApp had reached thousands of students across Africa and helped users access substantial scholarship funding.
Enter Forbes Africa
Yunge’s work eventually moved beyond Tanzania’s technology and entrepreneurship circles. In 2018, he was included in the Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 cohort in the Technology category, where he was identified as the founder of SomaApps Technologies.
The recognition placed him among a generation of African entrepreneurs who were being recognised for building businesses and solutions around the continent’s emerging technology economy and also helped bring wider attention to his work with SomaApp.
Yunge’s work highlights a much bigger question facing Africa: how can technology and investment make education more accessible and relevant to a rapidly changing continent? Today, that conversation extends beyond individual scholarships to the transformation of African universities themselves. The Mastercard Foundation AHEFT Prize, for example, supports institutions working to strengthen research, innovation, entrepreneurship, digital technologies and other areas of higher education.
Interestingly, Forbes was not the only major recognition Yunge received that year.
The Queen’s Young Leader Award
In 2018, Yunge received the Queen’s Young Leader Award, an initiative established to recognise young people from across the Commonwealth who were making a difference in their communities.
He was one of the Tanzanian recipients that year. His recognition was tied to his work using technology to expand educational opportunities for young Africans, particularly through SomaApp.
The award represented an interesting full circle in Yunge’s story. That the boy who had once viewed education as his own escape from poverty was now being recognized internationally for helping other young people access education.
But Yunge’s ambitions went beyond scholarships SomaApp was not the only technology project associated with Yunge. His work has also extended into areas including artificial intelligence, African data and health technology.
One of the projects associated with Yunge is Smart Kaya, a hands free smart speaker developed with the ambition of bringing African languages, accents, culture and technology together in one product. A pretty interesting story behind Yunge’s Kaya; in 2020, The Citizen reported that he was developing the smart speaker specifically because existing products such as Alexa and Siri struggled with African accents, languages, cultures and contexts. The vision was to create an African smart speaker rather than simply adapting Western technology.
He has also been involved in the development of health focused wearable technology, including Afribit, which was designed around monitoring health indicators.
Ashoka’s profile of Yunge describes his involvement in product development and his interest in creating technology suited to African consumers, particularly the needs and affordability constraints of lower-income users. This is significant because his technology journey has consistently centered on a similar question: how can technology solve problems that affect ordinary Africans?
A career that started before the spotlight
There is a tendency to discover people only when they enter the orbit of famous families. Yunge’s recent association with the Kenyan president’s family has therefore introduced his name to an entirely new audience.
But his public profile predates his relationship with Charlene Ruto by many years.
Before the engagement ceremony in Narok, there was already a career that included youth advocacy, UNICEF, the G8, education technology, international fellowships, entrepreneurship and global recognition. And perhaps the most interesting thing about his story is how connected those chapters are.
The teenager who taught street children became a youth representative. The youth representative who travelled internationally became an entrepreneur.
The university student who shared scholarship opportunities through WhatsApp turned that experience into SomaApp. And the entrepreneur who wanted to make education opportunities more accessible eventually found himself receiving one of the Commonwealth’s major youth leadership awards.
Yunge’s profile changed dramatically on August 8, 2026, when he and Charlene Ruto held their traditional Koito ak Chaik ceremony at the Ruto family’s Intonna Heritage Farm in Kilgoris, Narok County.
The ceremony formally introduced Yunge into the Ruto family and brought together prominent guests from Kenya and Tanzania.
For many Kenyans, it was the first time they were hearing about him, but the story of Isaya Yunge did not begin at Intonna Heritage Farm.
It began in Mwanza, with a boy who experienced instability but saw education as a way forward and continued with a teenager who decided that street children deserved to be heard.
It took him to Germany at 17, where he participated in the Junior 8 process connected to the G8 Summit. And eventually, it led him into technology, where he tried to solve a problem he had encountered firsthand: talented young people having the ambition to study but struggling to find the opportunities that could make it possible.
While much of the public conversation around Yunge understandably centres on his relationship with Charlene Ruto, there is another story worth knowing.
