Improve education for 2,500 children in Kenya

So far, 2016 is living up to its promise as an exciting and landmark year for African Promise.

In Kenya we are set to compete a major redevelopment of our seventh partner school in the next two weeks, bringing to an end a 15-month long project which has seen us comprehensively upgrade the school. Meanwhile we have active building projects in four of our other six partner schools, including the extension and upgrade of two pre-school units, as well as the construction of two primary classrooms, a five unit teachers house and a modern kitchen with energy saving stoves at one of the two schools currently without such a facility.

“I visited Ngambenyi late this week and it was amazing! Nobody expected that the school would be transformed this much. I believe it will make a big change to the pupils…they had suffered so much before.”

Mercy Marigo, former volunteer teacher at Ngambenyi Primary

Our feeding programme has expanded with the extension of the lunch programme to the 130 pupils at Ngambenyi and the launch of a breakfast club at Kiteghe Primary. All-in-all we now provide a daily breakfast of nutritious fortified porridge to around 30 of the most disadvantaged pupils, and a daily lunch of hearty maize (or rice) and beans to the more than 2,500 children across our partner schools.

In August we sent around 100 pupils from two schools on a two-day educational trip to the coastal city of Mombasa to visit sites of historic and cultural interest, as well as the airport and the beach! These trips are intended to inspire the children, many of whom would not get the opportunity to visit areas outside of the isolated communities in which they live. Indeed at least four students returned from this trip proclaiming that they now have ambitions of working in an airport or being a pilot!

Away from Kenya we have today launched our brand new mobile responsive website which we hope will offer visitors to our site a much improved user experience whichever platform or device they are using to browse the site. This much-needed project has been undertaken for us pro-bono by a small web design company and is another example of how we are increasingly benefiting from the donation of goods and services in kind and not just monetary gifts.

We are delighted to report on our recent activities and progress in our partner primary schools in Kasigau, Kenya:

School construction and development

Our latest whole school redevelopment project, at Ngambenyi Primary, is in its final stages and is on course for completion in time for the start of the last term of the year in September. Although not the largest single project we have ever undertaken, it is without doubt the best and we are very much looking forward to showing off the results of a year of hard work by our project management and building team.

At our other partner schools we have recently completed, are working on or have immediate plans to begin work on the construction of a further seven classrooms. These are all to provide additional capacity to cope with growing enrolments as well as to reduce existing over-crowding and high class numbers.

Feeding programme

Our school lunch programme goes from strength to strength and from September we will extend it to our seventh partner school, Ngambenyi, meaning a further 125 children (and now more than 2,500 in total) will benefit from a daily hot lunch. From September we will also begin piloting a breakfast club at one of our partner schools. This will target the most disadvantaged pupils, who very often come to school having not eaten since lunch the day before, and we are working closely with the school to identify these children. We will provide them with a cup of nutritous and fortified porridge.

Educational resources & learning

Since our latest update in April we have started funding a further two teaching positions, meaning we now fund a total of 11 teacher salaries across five of our seven partner schools. We have pledged to start funding a further position later in the year. These extra teachers are needed because of severe government shortfalls and are an absolutely vital tool for improving the quality of education in the schools. Later this year, or next, we hope to fund a teacher development workshop and seminar for teachers across our partner schools as well as others in the region that we do not yet work with.