Give Life-Changing Education to 500 Maasai Girls

Our fall trip to Kenya brought so many reasons for celebration. We visited Olderkesi Secondary School, where two new classrooms we built in partnership with the existing boarding school are now overflowing with nearly 200-day scholars from nearby villages — young people whose educations would otherwise likely have been cut short after 9th grade. Guided by the visionary leadership of Mr. Seno Lemara, Olderkesi offers a role model for the type of impact that can happen when day scholars are welcomed, supported, and integrated into boarding school classrooms. 

We also visited two new ECD primary schools in the arid Ilkerin region that were started by a retired longtime primary school teacher named Joseph Mutahi. When we drove up, Joseph was getting onto a motorbike completely festooned with the yellow 5-gallon jerrycans that women and girls across Africa use to fetch water, about to take off to the nearest waterhole so that he could gather water for the 100+ children who are now enrolled in those schools. Ilkerin, like much of the region, has been struggling with drought since March; Joseph has been taking this same trip most days since then to ensure those children have water to drink. The teachers at the school are trying to fundraise for a rainwater harvesting system next year. 

The stories we tell about the world profoundly shape our beliefs and actions. Joseph and Seno remind us that wherever you look in the world, everyday citizens are making a powerful difference, creatively crafting solutions to the most challenging of barriers. The most recent iteration of our Participatory Video project is focusing its lens on changemakers just like them — and on Maasai women who are challenging longstanding gendered stereotypes. Our goal is to create a library of stories we can share in communities across the Maasai lands where we work, using them as another tool to spark new ideas about the possibilities open for all Maasai girls.

Links:

• For the Good's website