Improve education for 2,500 children in Kenya

It has been a year of significant change both for our partner schools and for the charity.

In January, the first pupils entered the new grade 9 classes following the restructure of the education system in Kenya to include junior secondary between primary and secondary school. 

Our partner schools are now Comprehensives, incorporating three years of ECDE (pre-school), six primary grades (grade 1-6) and three junior secondary grades (grade 7-9).

This is one additional year group compared to before and as a result there are now more than 3,250 pupils learning across our eight partner schools, up from around 2,900 at the end of 2024.

Not all schools received funding from the government to create the extra learning space required and we have been helping our partner schools that were excluded from this support. 

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After nearly 20 years of tireless work since 2008, we have ended our day-to-day operational activities in Kasigau as of the end of June - moving instead to a model of providing financial support directly from the UK - and made the difficult but ultimately necessary decision to scale back the extent of our support for our partner schools from the end of this year. 

This year will be the last that we donate food for a daily lunchtime meal for every pupil at *all* of our partner schools - having paid for food for more than 5 million lunchtime meals for many thousands of children since 2013. 

It had already been decided a long time ago that there would be no ninth partner school; the extensive and still on-going redevelopment of our eighth partner school at Mkamenyi, perhaps our greatest achievement to date, will be an appropriate place for this chapter in the story to end. 

Whilst the extent and nature of our support will change, we will remain a friend to our partner schools; we are absolutely *not* abandoning them completely. We have invested too much time, money and, frankly, love (not to mention blood, sweat and tears) over the last two decades to do that!

We will continue to do whatever we can with whatever funds we have available but it is likely that this will not extend beyond providing modest ad-hoc contributions towards the upkeep of facilities and infrastructure, and for other small-scale projects, other than in some selected schools where existing long-term funders of our activities in those schools have committed to maintain their support in 2026 and beyond.  

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In light of our future plans, we have been busy spending down much of the nearly £100,000 that we had in the bank at the end of 2024 - plus funds that have been donated since - which has included helping to increase water storage capacity across our partner schools by some 250,000 litres - around 30% of the total capacity we have helped to add historically - and donating funds to schools to support the establishment and improvement of kitchen gardens, for extra furniture, for office equipment, and for other much-needed repair, maintenance and infrastructure works including hand-wash facilities. 

All of our partner schools now have AP-supported kitchen garden spaces in various stages of their development and this will be one initiative that we expect to continue supporting. 

Between now and the end of the year we have plans to donate more funds for essential repair and maintenance works, especially as the long holiday in November/December presents a window to carry out this work without disrupting day-to-day operations, and, as you might expect given the circumstances, there is a long list of projects for which our partner schools are requesting our support!

Beyond that the future is a little bit more unknown but, of course, we will keep you updated as plans evolve and become clearer. 

Thank you as always for your support.

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