1000 Voices for Hope - Mahiga Hope High

As our work for Education for All continues in Kenya and around the world, The Nobelity Project is celebrating ten years as a non-profit, a decade of telling inspiring stories and working to take inspired actions.

Mahiga Hope High and Mahiga Primary have been at the heart of our efforts since the beginning. And though we are a relatively small non-profit - with a U.S. staff of just two full time employees - we've managed to have relatively large impact through numerous partner projects around the world. With limited staffs and budgets, it's impossible for most nonprofits to work from scratch and have a large-scale impact. But by working with great community partners and by working to bridge existing gaps in education, there is a good chance of having an out-sized impact.

In Mahiga, the community partnership started with Mahiga Primary and extended soon after to establishing and building Mahiga Hope HIgh School. Both are public schools with local Boards of Governors, and operated under the auspices and with support funding from the region's Kieni West Education District. The work we've done and any other funding that have flowed from The Nobelity Project to Mahiga have come at the request of the schools, the headmasters and the Boards of Governors. By continually showing good results from the support, the school incentivizes our organization and our donors to want to do more.

Indentifying these critical "gaps" has been a learning experience that has served us well at many other education projects. Here's a starting principle: There is no education without clean water! Ten years ago, the first "gap" at Mahiga was clean water. The primary school kids were often sick from drinking contaminated water they had to bring to school, and we were asked to help the school build a purified water system. We considered a well and a pipeline, but decided to build a solar-power rainwater collection system, which continues to serve the school (and which has been expanded again and again as the campus has grown). Mahiga now has rainwater collection on six buildings with 100,000 liters of storage.

The primary school also had limited access to books and technology, so we also partnered on a library and computer lab, both of which opened kids minds to many new possibilities

A more literal gap soon became apparent. With no high school in the area, Mahiga kids either walked six miles each way to secondary or they didn't attend secondary at all. We closed the long gap between Secondaries by building Mahiga Hope High School. As the school population grew faster than the number of teachers, we've closed the gap by temporarily supporting additional staff at the school.

Dozens of students now graduate from Mahiga Hope High School each year - and from our other partner high schools in Kenya. Many complete high school with excellent grades, but lack funding for college or university. We're bridging those gaps by providing high education support to top scholars. Here's a link to a lovely thank you video from some of those Mahiga Grads who are sponsored in their higher education pursuits. These kids and others like them are the ultimate proof that briding the gaps really does work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1mWxu1J8dk

And ten years into telling inspiring stories and taking what we hope are inspired actions to bridge gaps, here's a short video look at what we've done - and what we still hope to do in the years to come. It's an inpiring piece built around an inpisiring song, "Love Cannot Be Broken" by Austin songwriter Bob Livingston.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWYQaO0bRw8

Thanks to everyone who's been a part of the work. Together, we are truly closing the gaps and helping in our own ways to create a world where Education for All is a reality.