Comparative analysis

A comparative analysis of 802 wives' surveys reveals how PBLF's Warrior and Warrior+Priest courses are shaping Kenyan families. 802 wives responded. Their answers became data. That data tells a story worth examining closely. 

Hundreds of Kenyan wives told us the same thing, independently and confidentially — not because we asked them to say it, but because it's what they observed in their own homes, long after the training ended and ordinary life resumed.

We have long believed that equipping a man with values-based leadership training changes his household. But belief is not evidence. So we did what few leadership programs take the time to do: we asked the person best positioned to assess the outcome — not the graduate, but the woman who lives with him.

Research objective and methodology

Across Western Kenya, the quiet crisis in so many homes isn't loud or dramatic — it's absence. Fathers who are physically present but emotionally gone. Husbands who provide unevenly, engage inconsistently, or carry conflict instead of peace into their own homes. Everyone feels it.  Almost no one measures it. This wasn't a survey handed out at graduation, while emotions were still high. Wives were interviewed six months to two years later — after the applause faded, after ordinary Tuesdays returned, after there was nowhere left for a man to hide who he'd really become. 

We wanted to know, with real rigor: does a values-based leadership experience actually reach into a man's home life — and does it stay there?

So between 2019 and 2025, our trained female volunteers confidentially and randomly surveyed 802 wives — 333 married to graduates of our Warrior course, and 469 married to men who completed both Warrior and our Priest course. Statistician Keith Kidiya, BSc Statistics (Taita Taveta University), led the independent analysis across five family impact indicators: Marriage Relationship, Gender-Based Violence Reduction, Father Engagement, Sharing of Household Responsibilities, and Responsibility to Provide.

Initial Outcomes: Strong results after a single training

A single Warrior course. Three concentrated days. And then — measured six to twelve months later, back in real homes, under real pressure — more than 9 in 10 wives reported genuine improvement across every single indicator we measured.

This is the finding that should stop you: behavior-change research around the world tells us that short interventions rarely produce results that last this long. And yet here they are — sustained, verified by the people living closest to the change.

Sustainability: Outcomes measured three to four years later

Here's where the story gets more remarkable. The Warrior+Priest wives weren't surveyed a few months later — they were surveyed three to four years after their husbands' first training. Enough time for a novelty to wear off completely. Enough time for old habits to quietly return, if that's all this ever was.

It wasn't. Positive outcomes among this group ranged from 93.6% to 98.7% — higher, not lower, than the Warrior group alone.

Depth of transformation: From "Improved" to "Much Improved"

This is the finding that reframes everything. When we looked past “improved” and isolated only the wives who reported the highest tier of change — “Much Improved” — the second course didn't just maintain the gains. The results showed significantly higher proportion of wives reporting that their husbands had made significant improvement. Here is exactly what wives reported, indicator by indicator, straight from the report:

1. 1. Marriage Relationship2. Gender-Based Violence Reduction3. Father Engagement4. Sharing of Household Responsibilities5. Responsibility to Provide

Look at the blue. In every single chart, the “Much Improved” bar — the deepest, most meaningful level of change — grows substantially longer for Warrior+Priest households. And the gray “Unchanged” bar, in every chart, shrinks toward nearly nothing.

Testimony from participating families

Numbers convince the mind. These convince the heart.

Behind every percentage point in this report is a woman who watched her husband change, a child who noticed a different father at the table, a household that quietly became safer, calmer, more whole.

Broader implications for family and community wellbeing

Engaged fathers don't just improve a household mood. They shape whether children stay in school. Whether homes are physically and emotionally safe. Whether a daughter grows up believing a good man is possible, and a son grows up knowing how to become one.

Most interventions addressing family harm in Kenya focus exclusively on women — necessary work, but work that leaves men entirely out of the solution. This data suggests a different, complementary path: reach the man, and the transformation doesn't stop with him. It moves through the whole household.

This report captures only the beginning of that pathway. Future analysis will extend into our King course and Wealth Creation program — because if three days can do this, we owe it to these families to find out what the full journey can do.

Access the full report

The numbers and charts above are only a glimpse. The full Comparative Analysis Report lays out the complete methodology, every data table, indicator-by-indicator breakdowns, and the discussion of what these findings could mean for the future of family strengthening across Kenya.