Wednesday 31 August 2011

Elimu for Africa!

It has been a very busy summer for Elimu. We are pleased and excited to announce that Elimu has now graduated to registered charity status; our full, official name is the Elimu Foundation for Africa. 

There has also been some local press publicity regarding our recent trip to Kenya, while new partnerships have been established with three more like-minded organisations.

The first of these is STAR4Africa which works with isolated communities in Ghana, Malawi, Zambia and Kenya and has recently expanded its activities to include school linking. The charity 
approached us with the idea of potentially working together on parts of our school linking programmes. This includes marking international events such as World Environment Day, World Food Day, and the Day of the African Child.

We are also working with the Kakamega Environmental Education Programme (KEEP), a grassroots organisation working to save the last remaining section of tropical rainforest in East Africa through environmental education, raising awareness in local communities, and developing economic alternatives to the use of forest reserves. Our sixth form trips to Kenya include a guided walk in Kakamega (led by the extremely knowledgeable Abraham), and from 2012, an overnight stay in the forest in KEEP's eco-friendly accommodation. All proceeds go towards KEEP's environmental education programmes in local schools.

Elimu recently became a member of Think Global which helps people learn about issues of global justice and development and to make connections between these things and their own lives. This is the main principle behind Elimu's school linking programmes.

Links to all our partner organisations can be found on our main website http://www.elimufoundation.org.uk/

We would like to thank both The Priory and Charles Darwin for supplying additional teaching resources and sports equipment to their link schools, Kipriria Academy and Kipsamo School. They have also been fundraising for new text books as part of an ongoing initiative for our UK schools to help stock brand new, first time libraries in the Kenyan schools. Kipsamo now has 22, rapturously recieved dictionaries and thesaureses where it had only one before. The Priory's Ann-Marie Bradley, who has now completed her A-Levels and a second trip to Kenya, presented Kipriria's staff and students with several new story books as a gift to the school from her family.

Below is a report on Stalion nursery and infants school detailing more about the school, its character, management, and hopes for the future.

















Stalion will be re-developed in stages. Stage 1 will lay the foundations for the new school up to the window level at a cost of £5,000. Builders have been found in Nandi Hills and Elimu's fundraising efforts for the next several months will be concentrated on this project so that work can begin on the new building as soon as possible.

If you would like to help, or if you have any suggestions, please contact us via our website - and keep an eye out for our next fundraiser.

And finally... thank you to Rob Probin who has worked with us from the very early days of a one-off project which grew into Elimu and who came on two trips to Kenya, before retiring from The Priory School this past July. After 32 years, Rob is now moving onto new things and we wish him well with all of them.

Best wishes to all our partner schools for a peaceful and productive new term,

Jo


Wednesday 3 August 2011

In the Nandi, the mighty Nandi...

Colobus monkeys, epic traffic jams on dusty roads, songs on tap, excited children, playground games and nine-a-side, Kiswahili lessons with the headmaster, teaching, tea factories and tree planting... These were things which characterised Elimu's latest trip to Kenya with sixth form students and teachers from The Priory School, in Orpington, Kent, and Charles Darwin School in nearby Biggin Hill.

They were greeted warmly by their partner schools, Kipriria and Kipsamo, and by the people of Nandi Hills. Lively exchanges took place in the market stalls in town, with impromptu Q&A sessions all about England, and, at one point, a young mother's tongue-in-cheek offer to hand over her two-year-old, free of charge.

Prior to our arrival, Elimu's enterprising in-country rep., Sally Sang, had enquired about the possibility of tree planting which led the Ministry for Forestry to very generously donate 1000 seedlings as part of Kenya's conservation drive and to help mark our visit. The idea of planting a few trees having taken on a new meaning, 51 eucalyptus, cypress and indigineous trees were planted in the grounds of Kipsamo School by our party of 20 together with Elimu staff, Kipsamo teachers and local elders. The remaining seedlings will go to other schools in Nandi Hills.

Our visit to Kipsamo generated much interest among the school's teaching staff and also local educationalists who were keen to observe our teachers and to find out about education in the UK. The day's events, organised by Sally to introduce Charles Darwin and Kipsamo for the first time, included an inter-schools football match. All of which was captured on film by our own cameraman, Rob Probin of The Priory School, and by a television news reporter. A special news feature was subsequently beamed across Kenya's Rift Valley.

Our sixth form students experienced life at the front of the classroom, too, and did an excellent job of teaching Kipriria's students playground games with educational messages which encourage teamwork, reflection and real-life application. These games were inspired by the organisation Right to Play and taught to the sixth formers during orientation. Kipriria's headteacher, Jared Nyakundi, held daily Kiswahili lessons with them which went down so well that by the end they were composing songs using both Kiswahili and English, including a reworking of the 'Lion King' song, this time with the line:

'In the Nandi, the mighty Nandi, Elimu rips it up!'




We thank everyone involved in this trip: our many hosts, the sixth formers and their teachers, Alison, Hazel, Kerim and Rob, who shared their own unique styles of teaching. Also, our headteachers, 
Jared Nyakundi (Kipriria), Julius Kerich (Kipsamo), Nick Ware (The Priory School) and Rob Higgins (newly retired from Charles Darwin) as well as Kipriria's director, David Yego, for his unending hospitality and the use of his school bus! We have been involved with Kipriria and The Priory in different ways for a long time.

Elimu has a lot of work ahead with each of the schools to ensure that their links with one another, and with other local schools who may benefit from coming together more often, are worthwhile both in the moment and in the longer term. Our fundraising plans for the next year are focused on Stalion nursery and infants school.

In the meantime... please consider donating to the Red Cross' East Africa Food Crisis appeal for the people affected by the famine in the Horn of Africa, the worst it has seen for 60 years. This includes north-west Kenya. Ordinary Kenyans have so far contributed 100 million Ksh. (around £700,000) to the relief effort through the Kenyans for Kenya initiative.

Food costs in the rest of the country have more than doubled since January. We saw during our visit to Nandi Hills that this has resulted in an increase in school fees as schools will otherwise be unable to continue feeding children.

What has happened, and is happening now, is a complex situation but we emphasise the importance of joining Kenyan people in giving to the Red Cross appeal to help where it can with the current crisis: 
http://www.redcross.org.uk/foodcrisis/?approachcode=68764_heroEAfrFood

The Independent has a report on the situation in north-west Kenya available on its website
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/kenya-is-on-the-brink-of-its-own-disaster-2329287.html While the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF), a non-profit organisation whose Flying Doctor Service we sign-up to for our school trips, has further insights and updates http://www.amref.org/news/update-on-amref-drought-response/


Asante sana,

Jo