Educating street children in the Mathare slums

Happy New Year 2021 and I sincerely hope this year brings with it good tidings.

I’m sending my heartfelt thanks to you, and to everyone who makes our shared work possible.

There is steady progress and, with it, so much hope in our endeavor. Hope that flows from having partners and friends like you and from the individual efforts of staff and the board working to ensure that the children we serve receive an education and live in a more just and healthy world.

Today, I’m thinking about one such child – who is no longer a child anymore - born and raised in the slums of Mathare in a family of 11 children, am thinking of George.

Meet George whom I have featured here before on his accomplishments.

George joined St. Michael Hill Primary School as a Kenya Certificate of Primary Education candidate in 2003. He thereafter joined Our Lady of Fatima Secondary School in 2004, where he attained B+ in Kenya Certificate Secondary Education in the year 2007. He then joined Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology for a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration – Human Resource Management {2009 – 2013], and attained Second Class Honors {Upper Division}. He continued with his education and attained a Master of Science in Human Resource Management (MSc. HR) in 2016. 2020, George made us proud when he received his Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration (PhD), a first for us as an organization but he is also the youngest PhD holder in his university at age 33!

Together we helped ensure that George and others like him was able to get an education, we kept all our lifesaving and education programs running strong, expanded our care and support to marginalized communities across Mathare and the surrounding slums.

You played a vital role in those efforts, and your continued partnership gives us continued hope for the future. Optimism and action are the only options for building a better, more humane world, in 2021—and beyond.

With your generous support, we continue to keep children safe and in school and for this we are forever grateful.

Like they say: Education has both societal and personal benefits. Education provides individuals with a foundation for individual and collective development. On that foundation, much of humanity’s economic and social wellbeing is built. Education is key to increasing economic efficiency and social consistency; it helps to raise the poor from poverty and, thus, eliminates poverty-driven crime. Supporting education, therefore, is one of the smartest investment towards achieving holistic human development – social, economic and other.

With warm wishes and gratitude.