Education Kenya Project #5574

Support girls' education and end FGM in Kenya

by Kakenya's Dream

Project Report | May 7, 2019
Kakenya's Dream Partners with Storymoja

By Zoe Colgin | Communications and Development Associate

In communities like Enoosaen, there are no local bookstores or public libraries, and most schools lack the resources to provide students with a variety of reading material. As a result, children do not develop the habit of reading for pleasure. At Kakenya’s Dream, we know that reading not only leads to improved academic performance, but is also key to building children’s vocabulary, sparking curiosity, improving critical thinking, and introducing them to new concepts, places, and ideas. Therefore, we partnered with Storymoja, a creative Kenya-based organization that creates and publishes African storybooks, to nurture a lifelong love for reading in our girls.

Storymoja offers a wide array of African children’s books, academic textbooks, career literature, and more. Storymoja also runs an innovative program called Start a Library, which supplies school libraries with all of these different kinds of books and trains staff on developing reading programs within the school. Through this new partnership, Storymoja will lead capacity-building workshops for students, teachers, and librarians at KCE I and II on library management, student career counseling, strategies for bringing books to life for readers, and more. Storymoja will also support Kakenya’s Dream’s efforts to establish after-school reading clubs for students and assist with expanding and diversifying KCE I and II’s library selection with career guidance literature and storybooks by African authors.

During the last week of March, the Kakenya’s Dream-Storymoja partnership kicked off with a career guidance session for our high school students and a two-day teacher training workshop on library management. During the career guidance session, our students took their first career aptitude test. The test results identified a handful of career opportunities that match each student’s individual skillset and personality. Having grown up in a very remote community, our students were not aware of many of the career paths listed by the test results. Stroymoja gave them literature and resources to learn more about the career fields they matched with. The girls were thrilled to be matched with jobs and career paths they hadn’t heard of before, and were eager to explore them and learn more!

In our second workshop, our teachers and staff worked with the Storymoja team to develop strategies to encourage students' interest in reading. Together, they practiced integrating storybooks into our teachers' lesson plans to teach life skills and important academic concepts. By using more storybooks in the classroom, our teachers will continue to foster our students’ desire to continue reading outside of the classroom.

For students like ours who live in a very remote part of the world, books hold the power to expand their horizons by exposing them to the vast diversity of the human experience outside of their community. At Kakenya’s Dream, we believe in the importance of filling young minds not only with academia, but with fairytales, folklore, mystery, poetry, and more. We hope to help our students find the literature that sparks a lifelong love of reading, and we look forward to growing our partnership with Storymoja to achieve just that.

Your support ensures that we can continue to nurture the love of reading in our students. Thank you for joining us to empower girls through knowledge and education!

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Mar 7, 2019
KCE Student Shines in National Primary School Exam

By Jennica Stephenson | Assistant Director

Mary at KCE

In 2018, 33 girls completed 8th grade at the Kakenya Center for Excellence. This is a critical juncture for students in Kenya, who must all sit for the KCPE (Kenya Certificate of Primary Education). This exam determines their academic future, including what calibur of high school they will be qualified to attend. Our girls once again made us proud, with 80% of the class scoring well above the government’s pass rate. While only 17% of girls from their community are able to transition from primary to secondary school, all 33 of these girls joined high schools across Kenya in January.

We want to tell you about Mary, who was KCE’s top scoring student in the recent national primary school exam. Mary's family lives nearly 50 miles from KCE’s campus, in one of the most remote villages located in the Maasai Mara National Reserve. Often, access to basic necessities in such a remote location is limited. Mary is the second-oldest of 17 siblings. Her father is a herdsman and makes a living selling cattle to support his family. “My wives and I never went to school but we know that education is important for all of our children. We encourage and support their studies because education will enable them to have better lives in the future. That is why we are proud of Mary’s hard work and good performance in school. She is a role model to both her older and younger siblings as well as other children in our village,” says Kaipai, Mary’s father.

Noolmirisho is Mary’s step-mother. She says her step-daughter loves to share what she’s learning with the entire family. “Last year, Mary had the opportunity to travel abroad with 3 other KCE students for an educational conference in America. She shared with us what she learned and about the wonderful experiences she had, including flying in an airplane and seeing snow for the first time. During her school breaks, Mary always informs us of new skills and knowledge gained at school and at Health and Leadership Trainings, and she even tutors her siblings in their weak subject areas,” Noolmirisho says.

Mary’s mother, Noolkisaruni, also shares the same sentiments as her husband and Noolmirisho. “I am proud of my daughter and grateful for her good performance. I wish her the very best as she transitions to high school and I trust that she will continue to work hard in school,” she says.

Mary’s favorite subjects in school are mathematics, English and Swahili. Having been inspired and excited after taking her very first flight last year, Mary aspires to be a pilot when she finishes school. She says that it was the support she received from Kakenya’s Dream and all of her teachers at KCE that contributed to her excellent performance in the national primary school exam. “I expected to perform well in my exams because I had been taught by well trained teachers who were committed to seeing their students thrive. I am also grateful to my parents for taking me to school and supporting my studies,” she says.

Your support ensures that we can provide these holistic services to students like Mary and her fellow KCE alumnae. Thank you for joining with us to make girls' dreams come true!

Mary with her father, mother, and stepmother

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Dec 14, 2018
7th Annual International Day of the Girl

By Zoe Colgin | Communications and Development Associate

With your support, we have been able to empower and educate girls for almost 10 years. As 2018 winds down, we continue to celebrate our girls and all of their accomplishments over the past year. In fact, recently we celebrated them at our 7th Annual International Day of the Girl event.

This year, Kakenya’s Dream hosted over 600 local girls, teachers, parents, and community members at the Kakenya Center for Excellence in October to celebrate the International Day of the Girl.

Participants marched together through the streets of Enoosaen in a parade to raise awareness about the challenges girls face, and to demand better opportunities and conditions for girls in Kenya and around the world.

We know that many of the 1.1 billion girls of today’s world face a variety of obstacles that thwart their education, training, and entry into the workforce. Some of the biggest barriers both for our girls, and for others around the world, include FGM, early marriage, and pregnancy. This year, it is estimated that 12 million girls under 18 will be married, and 21 million girls between the ages of 15 and 19, and 2.5 million girls under the age of 16 years will give birth in developing countries.

Though these obstacles can seem daunting at times, we know that when girls are given the resources and support they need to stay in school and out of early marriages, they persist, and they thrive. At Kakenya’s Dream, our girls are raising their voices against gender inequality, injustice, and violence, and demanding that their rights be respected by all.

At the celebration, girls were asked to write a commitment to themselves and their future by finishing the sentence “If you invest in me, I will…” Likewise, parents, teachers, and community members were also asked to make promises to invest in and improve opportunities for the girls.

By the end of the day, hundreds of pledges and commitments were made both by the girls and other event attendees. Now, we must hold each other accountable to these promises to invest in girls and create opportunities and bright futures for them, and, by extension, their families, communities, and our world.

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