Educate & Empower a Student in Kenya

We are convinced that education plays a key role in the struggle against poverty. That is why Progressive Volunteers is working on all these projects to support needy students and help schools in economically and socially disadvantaged areas in our community. Education is imperative to tackling poverty. When individuals have the chance to learn basic life and literacy skills, economies grow faster and poverty rates decline. When people go to school, they are able to eventually earn more money and support their families

Despite the elimination of school fees in Kenya it has been common practice for primary and secondary schools to collect additional money or resources from parents to fill in the gaps left by the limited government allocations. Other associated costs such as transportation and uniforms have rendered school education inaccessible to the poorest and vulnerable. The most affected are children living in the slum areas of the city and rural areas. With the help of numerous donors, our community library with 2,330 books for all ages, school books, literature and fiction, numerous magazines, newspapers have offered students a place to read from and get academic assistance from a pool of volunteer teachers and mentors.

In 2019, we had a target of reaching out to 40 needy students, we can report that we are far below average and have to work extra hard in the remaining 3 months to meet the target. We have devised a method of making good use of our community lilbrary to reach out to many more students to read from.

One of the schools heads we have partnered with for 6 years had this to say about the support to his school: “Since St Joseph Education Centre received the books, student population has increased, and teachers have found it easier to teach. Our children are happy with the support and here is a comment from one pupil (Purity, a class seven): "My performance has improved, both my teachers and parents are happy with me. I used to get 297 marks out of 500, but now I score 385 marks out of 500.. I hope to perform better than this next time. I will be the best in my final exams in class eight’’.