Child Protection Kenya Project #6691

Keeping Kenyan Kids in School!

by Global Roots

Project Report | Feb 10, 2017
Kenyan School Lunches Update!

By Rick Montgomery | Executive Director

Our Founder and James!

Our Kenyan School Lunch program continues to be among our most successful programs — and 2016 brought plenty of developments!

Now in its sixth year, our program has placed greenhouses, vegetable gardens and hen houses in schools around the Matulani school district and seen great results from it. The headmaster of the school district has informed us that regular school attendance is now at an impressive ninety percent!! To put this into perspective, in the Seattle Public School District, the current goal is to achieve 80% regular attendance during the first 20 days of school.
Beyond attendance, our Matulani headmaster has informed us that exams scores are up district wide and matriculation rates have increased as well. This is great news for our Matulani children!

In addition to increased metrics, we have made other developments to improve our program success in 2016. For example, we have found an excellent way to combat corruption. We have learned, through careful observation and oversight, that when we replace a single oversight entity with a group of invested individuals, we can eliminate corruption and inappropriate spending. To this end, we have discovered that tapping into the collective oversight of the school PTA has led to the transparency we at Global Roots require. These enthusiastic parents work together to make sure that our projects stay corruption free so that their children can continue to benefit.

We have confronted very few schools anywhere in the world that do not have an active PTA. Thanks to the fact that new parents join any given PTA every year (older members matriculate out with their graduating children) it is nearly impossible for corruptive forces to take root. We are careful to remain in close contact with PTA presidents and we always welcome new members with a letter and a phone call from our Nairobi-based manager.

We are now raising funds to erect a second greenhouse at Matulani and expand our rabbit farm and hen house. If we do these things, food production will exceed consumption and the program will move towards self sustainability in 2022.

Meet James. Both of his parents are dying of AIDS and he relies 100% on the support he gets from the amazing teachers and school master (our partners) at Matulani Elementary School. Global Roots provides monthly funding ($700) for Matulani’s school lunch program that includes greenhouse vegetables, an outside kale garden (a small miracle because our giant greenhouse effectively scares away wild elephants!), a 100-strong hen house and two-year old rabbit farm.

The hot lunch served at Matulani is the only nutritious meal James gets every day. Fortunately, a generous Global Giving donor is now providing $10 every weekend for James, his brother and his parents to eat on the weekend.

Links:

Kenya Children's Garden Program

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