Rebuilding Buyani Secondary School

Over the years the foundation has been helping to rebuild Buyani Secondary School and our success can be seen from the series of past reports. Thank you all for your support.

In April this year, heavy rains hit the area and despite all the progress made over the recent years, it is now more important to attend to the issue of poor sanitation in the school. Therefore for this second half of the year our focus is to call upon well-wishers to help us in raising capital to construct good toilets for the school.

From September 2016, the school has been getting warnings from the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation about their poor sanitation facilities. The school has a population of 254 presently, with 115 girls and 139 boys.

The Principal prepared a detailed appeal to the foundation on this particular matter and we would like to assist them as soon as funds are available. The school has temporally toilets to help alleviate the problem for now. We intend to replace these temporary structures with adequate permanent toilet. The Principal's appeal is attached here.

Currently the school has six classrooms and one laboratory. The school is sourcing funds from aid organizations and parents to construct two new classrooms to accommodate the surging student population. Tana River Life Foundation will focus on raising funds for the construction of Toilets. We have a shortfall of USD 2,000 for the proposed project.

We look forward to a successful campaign over the next 3 months. Thank you all once again.

In 2015, we provided solar lanterns as well as solar panels to the school. The solar panels are now fully utilized by the school to  power the 2 computers in the school and to light the classrooms at night for students to do their homework. Students from more than 7 villages in the Chara Location attend Buyani Secondary School. Some students  are unable to go in to school at night to do their homework after dinner. As a result we will be providing solar lanterns to Form Four students who live in  villages furthest from the school. During our quarterly visit to the school, Emmanuel aged 20 years shared, “I commute from Kibokoni and I prefer doing my night studies at home because the school is far from home and sometimes I encounter wild animals on my way home.” This was seconded by another student Ali aged 17 years from Ozi village where he is quoted, “I usually study at home at night but at times there is a shortage of paraffin and I am not able to complete my assignments.”

We visited  the homes of some of our beneficiaries and the parents were very grateful for what the donors have been contributing to them. One parent Mr. Makorani shared, “I used to struggle to pay school fees but now I no longer experience any difficulties because the bigger part of the fees is paid by the Tana River Life Foundation. The mobile library program that is currently running has also been beneficial to us parents as we try to cover for other basic needs while the students get books to read through the foundation”

Another plan for the year is to build a twin toilet for the girls as girls tend to be more sensitive to sanitation than guys. We are still short of the initial cost for starting the construction and it is on our plan on how we can engage the local community as well on how we can build the twin toilet with the contribution that we will raise from well-wishers.

We are hoping for a great year ahead. Thank you for all of the support.