We Are Family Campaign

INEND came to us with a simple but important challenge: how do we help Kenyan audiences better understand the experiences of the LGBTQ+ community at a time when stigma, discrimination and violence were becoming increasingly visible?

The brief gave us the theme: family, acceptance and empathy. Our job was to find a way to make those ideas feel personal.

Before we could tell the story, we had to understand it.

We started by listening. Through conversations and interviews, we explored the experiences behind the issue: from family and friendship to identity, acceptance and rejection.

Those conversations helped shape the characters, relationships and stories that followed.

Once we understood the issue, we started looking for a way to tell it through people rather than talking points. We wanted each character to have their own personality, relationships and experiences, rather than representing just one side of the conversation.

Davii became our main character and the thread through the campaign, with Oti beside him. From there, we developed Kevoo, Bonnie, Aisha, Amina, Mwangi and Nya; each carrying a different story around family, identity, love, rejection, self-acceptance and belonging.

We turned the experiences we uncovered into a series of stories that people could follow, rather than simply being told what to think. Davii and Oti became our guides, taking the audience through stories of family, identity, love, rejection and belonging.

We then brought those stories to life through characters, environments and expressive comic-style illustrations, creating a visual language that felt distinctly Kenyan, approachable and human.