Maya Okafor founded Hearts of Hope on her own doorstep in 2008 with a pot of jollof rice and 38 hungry kids. She passed away in March 2024 after a brief illness, surrounded by her family. This page is hers her words, her work, and what we promised her we'd keep doing.
Born in Onitsha in October 1981. The daughter of a primary-school teacher and a hospital orderly, she was the first in her family to finish secondary school and the first to leave the city for tertiary training. She trained as a paediatric nurse in the early 2000s, qualified in 2003, and went straight onto the night-shift roster at a teaching hospital, where she worked the paediatric ward for fourteen unbroken years. Colleagues remember her for two things: her near-photographic recall of every child on the ward by name and discharge date, and a small notebook she carried in her apron pocket where she wrote down anything a parent told her between rounds.
She qualified third in her cohort and was offered a transfer to the surgical ward inside her first year a faster track to senior nursing and a better salary. She turned it down twice. Paediatrics was the work she had come for, and she stayed there. The night shift suited her; she was a morning cook and an evening reader, and the quiet of a paediatric ward at 3am was, she said, the best time to actually listen to a child or a parent who hadn't been able to get a word in during day rounds. The notebook filled up roughly every four months. By the time she stopped working the ward in 2017, there were forty-three of them on a shelf in the hallway of the family home in Yaba.
Married to Tunde Okafor, an electrical engineer she'd met at a friend's wedding in Ibadan, in 2007. Mother of three Adaeze (now a doctor in Sydney), Chinedu (a software engineer in London) and Kemi (still in school at the time of writing). In August 2008, on a Wednesday afternoon between shifts, she cooked her first 38 meals on her own doorstep. There was no incorporation, no donor list, no plan beyond the next school holiday. The plan came later. The cooking, as she put it for the rest of her life, came first.
She kept her nursing license active until 2019, ten years after we'd grown beyond anything one ward could absorb, and she kept showing up for occasional cover shifts at the hospital until 2018 the doctors there said it was good for the students to see her work. She kept cooking, in person, at the founding kitchen, on the same Saturday roster, until the week before she died. She never accepted a salary from the Foundation; her only income from the work was reimbursement for travel, and she insisted those receipts be filed line-by-line in the public ledger. The apron was the same one she'd worn on the ward. The notebook in the pocket was the same one too. The pen, by the end, was a different one. She would have been the first to point that out.
From a 2019 long-form interview, on the record and republished here with permission of her family.
Maya, on what people now call the founding moment.
On her practice of personally visiting every new partner kitchen for at least two service shifts.
On adopting the 100% policy and the annual report cycle.
In her last months, Maya sat with the board across four long sessions and wrote five things into our governance charter. They were not suggestions or aspirations. They were the conditions under which she handed the Foundation forward. They are now non-negotiable, reviewed annually by the full board, and any change to the language requires a unanimous vote of all directors plus 90 days of public notice to donors. No director has tabled a change to a single word.
No program is approved unless it improves a child's life directly and measurably. Programs that benefit adults indirectly are welcome but they have to be built around a child-first outcome that we can name, measure and report on. The CEO is required to sign every quarterly program review against this test in writing.
No board majority, no donor influence and no operational pressure can override it. The three-pool financial structure (donor pool, operations pool, endowment) is hard-locked. The treasurer attests to the separation every quarter and the auditor verifies it every year.
We do not enter a country where we don't have a vetted local partner who has been operating there longer than us. Ever. The partner leads the work; we resource it. We have walked away from two well-funded country expansions in the last four years for failing this test, and we will keep walking.
Reconciled internally each month, published in full within 90 days of fiscal year-end. Not summarised, not curated. Where it didn't work, we say so. Where it did, the receipts are on the page.
Adekunle Street. Cooking weekly. Forever. The kitchen is the origin of everything else, and we will not become the kind of organisation that grows past its founding work. Saturdays, hot meals, the same neighbourhood, no exceptions. The line item is permanent.
Established by Tunde Okafor and the Foundation board in memory of Maya. The Maya Fund will grant emergency paediatric scholarships to children supported through our partner programs full primary tuition, school meals, uniforms, books, and folded-in paediatric care once partner MOUs are in place. 100% of donations to the fund flow through to scholarships within 90 days of receipt; principal is never spent. The fund is managed by an independent investment committee chaired by Tunde Okafor, tracked as a separate line in our Annual Report, and ringfenced from every other pool of capital we hold. The Maya Fund is in pre-launch and will open its first scholarship cohort once delivery partners are formally engaged.
The Maya Fund's inaugural scholarship cohort will be opened once partner schools and clinics are formally engaged. Cohort size, locations and per-child costed scholarship will be published as the cohort is built.
Each subsequent cohort will be sized to the available endowment yield and reported as a separate line in the Annual Report, with outcomes followed up through the child's full schooling.
Donate directly to the Maya Fund. Every dollar passes through to a paediatric scholarship within 90 days of receipt once the inaugural cohort opens.
Read the full timeline of Maya's foundation work in our Our Story page, or browse the annual reports she set in motion every year of her tenure.
