Portrait of Najma with her mom. Najma is the first of 10 siblings to go to high school and started her senior year in January, 2024. Photo: October, 2023. By Kate Lapides-Black.

 

OUR APPROACH

We expand access to education for girls in Kenya by partnering with local Maasai communities to reduce the local barriers to their educations. But our work doesn’t stop with program implementation. We monitor, evaluate, and iteratively adjust the programs we create to ensure they are having their intended impact. We engage and activate local youth and leaders in our programs and open source projects such as our COVID-remote education response to ensure our programs are low-cost, independently scalable, and most importantly, sustainable after we leave.

 

PLANNING

We work with local partners to assess level of need, local populations of school-aged children and community interest in education to identify the most strategic locations to open new secondary schools, onboard new interns and engage leadership in our programs.

 

IMPLEMENTATION
Our Kenyan staff and interns spend months visiting with local families to listen and learn about their challenges and any concerns they may have about formal education. They work to establish parents’ buy-in to education for all of their children, including their girls, and work to build local capacity by engaging and uniting local parent-led School Management Committees, teachers and other stakeholders to work together to promote increased educational opportunity for girls.

 

MONITORING & EVALUATION:
To ensure children continue to enroll in school and graduate for years to come, we actively monitor enrollment through our Team Angaza interns at the primary level and our first-year grant for secondary school program. In 2023, we also engaged an external auditor to confirm enrollment retention. We also continually evaluate shifting barriers to girls’ education in the region we work and make necessary adjustments to our programs to ensure they are are having the impact we intend for them to have and responding to the highest needs.

 

SUSTAINABILITY
Our internship program trains local secondary school graduates to do the bulk of our community outreach and school enrollment work. Our investment in the professional training and post-secondary educations of these local young Maasai creates a new generation who understand the value of education and become local champions for girls’ and their education.