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