Educational opportunities in Kenya & Uganda

Just five days before this summer started, unforeseen circumstances meant EPAfrica took the decision to locate all Kenya Project Workers (PWs) in Kakamega. As a result, we operated the biggest ever EPAfrica site in Kakamega this year! Calum and Anna, our intrepid Pre-Summer Team busily visited schools, arranging accommodation for trios and giving the very welcome, if last-minute, news to some pipeline schools that this would be their first year of EPAfrica investment. We are very grateful to our partner schools for taking the change of plan in their stride.

On Wednesday 4^th July the first-half Summer Team met 28 eager and nervous PWs at Jomo Kenyatta Airport.The group responded well to an intense training week, breaking only for World Cup matches and to cook for 32 people. They finished off the week by running the Head Teachers Conference, departing Kakamega in their HT’s cars, ready to explore their partner schools.

We partnered with 10 schools in Kakamega this summer. Having eight trios meant that most of these schools received a bigger investment than any other years. This gave the PWs more room to try different investment options, working towards our five goals in new and exciting ways.

One common issue that emerged from the discovery phase was malnutrition. Some PWs witnessed a student having a fit, which could be linked to the lack of variation in her diet. Others found that in their school surveys, one of the biggest complaints for students was lunch. With a bigger group and more people-hours, one PW led a working group, exploring these issues in more detail and compiling a database of nutritional information for common Kenyan foods.

The Innovation Seed Fund applications showed that PWs had clever ideas of how we could resolve this problem, and funds were awarded to initiatives introducing a fishing pond to one school and building vertical gardens in another. We will carry the learning over to next summer.

Some of our partnerships worked on a few, high value investments, such as water projects. This wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the larger budget trios afforded. It is clear from our work with partner schools and from Summer Team’s school selection that access to reliable, clean water remains an issue. Beyond securing a safe water source, there are many more ways water can help improve education: having running taps in the science, laboratory, for instance can help with: conducting experiments; maintaining equipment; and health and safety.

During the summer we ran a Project Worker Instagram Takeover across both sites. This was held on a Global Giving Match Funding Day, which helped us to fundraise extra money for the schools we worked with this summer. At St Mary’s Mukhuma, this money was used to renovate the science laboratory. They built new benches, installed gas and sinks and improved storage of the equipment. The local MP was so impressed with EPAfrica’s investment that he came to open the laboratory in person – another first for us! 

Project Workers weren’t the only volunteers investing money this year. A central-pot pilot was run by the second-half Summer Team in Kakamega, helping us to engage with pre-selection and graduate schools on another level. This was the first time Summer Team have been given an investment budget to manage and they explored a broad range of solutions to problems that had emerged from school visits. You can read about them all on our blog. From Period Parties to Projector Skills, Solar Power to Girl-friendly toilets, the pilots demonstrated the variety of issues faced by Kenyan schools today, as well as the ways they can be tackled in partnership.

The volunteers in Kakamega pulled off a great feat this year. They dealt with a lot of new challenges, facing them with the typical solutions-focused attitude. Our schools were very grateful for the investments made, and future projects will build on the firsts dealt with this summer in future projects. It seems we benefited from the larger group of volunteers – we had more money, came up with more ideas, made more friends and had more people to play mafia! 

Solar energy: A sunny solution to boarding school blackouts

Anyone who has spent any time in Kenya knows that power cuts are frequent and disruptive. The effects of  these outages are particularly dire in boarding schools, where students are plunged into darkness every time there is a power cut, severely inhibiting their ability to revise or do their homework outside of daylight hours (7am to 7pm). The cuts are unpredictable and can last several hours or even days.

Electricity bills in the secondary schools we work in average at almost £700 a year. We have also found that monthly bills are wildly inconsistent both within and between schools; one Head Teacher told us that she paid 10000Ksh one month, and 2700Ksh the next, with no conceivable explanation.

This year, the Kakamega Summer Team, whose main job is to support PW’s and oversee their projects, was given its own pot of funding with which to run a number of pilot projects. The purpose was to see how we can utilise our extensive network of schools and Summer Team’s  collective experience in delivering projects. This gave us the freedom to explore broader issues than can be tackled by Project Workers working in just one school, and to take on more ambitious endeavours.

Madame Azibeta Odongo

The perfect school

We made solar energy one of our main focus areas early on, and our coordinator, Catherine Donzé took the lead. She started by making a shortlist of viable recipients, for which she painstakingly called round and visited a great number of schools from our partnership network. She eventually came  back from a visit positively glowing: “I have found the perfect school!” she announced to us.

St  Elizabeth Bumia Secondary School is located in a small village outside of Mumias and has 140 boarders. Madame Azibeta Odongo, its fantastically proactive and tenacious  Principal, told Catherine of how her students struggle to go about their lives during blackouts, and was greatly enthused by the idea of having solar power.

Together, Catherine and Mme Azibeta interviewed suppliers and technicians, collecting quotations and installation plans.

As is often the case when working for EPAfrica, a lot of very niche knowledge was developed by Summer Team; we all felt like solar energy experts as we listened to Catherine explain her research on lumens and inverters and helped her make endless calculations to sense-test the quotations she was receiving.

Solar panels are costly and we wanted to be certain that we would be funding quality work with a really long-lasting impact. Catherine got detailed quotations from five different suppliers, settling in the end for Hassan from SIMNet. The Principal was confident in his ability and level of experience. As she told me later “he knew exactly what to do and how. Many others had to call someone for advice, but when he was here he was taking calls to give advice to others”.

Together, they decided to install three solar panels on the roof of the school, powering five classrooms as well as the admin block.

Engineers installing the panels on the roof

Work is complete

Within a couple of days of the final quotation being drawn up and paid, the solar panels were up and functioning.

Mr Francis Saka – PTA Chairman

The school started using them “from day one”, the PTA chairman told us. “We could not believe it when we received our electricity bill this month! It was 23Ksh (~20p). We thought they had made a mistake.”

The project has been successful; the school is saving a large amount of money every month and it no longer has to rely on Kenya Power’s patchy supply. The solar panels themselves come with a 20-year warranty, and there are two watchmen on duty every night, meaning that the risk of theft or vandalism is close to none.

Even I was surprised by how quickly the school started benefiting; when I was told what their electricity bill amounted to I was just as amazed as the PTA chairman. I really hope that as we move forward, we can replicate this project across more schools in our network.

Links:

• Find out more about summer 2018 here!