Give Life-Changing Education to 500 Maasai Girls

In June, 2020, you helped reconnect hundreds of students in remote Maasai communities to their education by funding the launch of an offline learning program, Kolibri, that allowed them to continue to study during COVID-necessitated school closures. We focused the program on Grade 8 students so that they could continue to prepare for the competitive national secondary school entrance exams they normally take at the end of the school year. The program became a lifeline that kept young Maasai students connected to school and learning.

Key Impacts of this Program over the summer and fall of 2020:

• 363 students from 17 different schools were connected to remote digital lessons via intensive outreach efforts by our Kenyan staff. Our team worked 12-hour days crisscrossing the 646-square mile remote Loita Hills region by foot and motorbike on muddy roads to deliver tablets to teachers and students and instruct them in their use.
  
  
• Once a month over the summer and continuing into October, our staff repeated this intensive outreach effort in order to load one month’s worth of new curriculum onto each student’s tablet. Content was curated with an emphasis on finding engaging, interactive and culturally relevant lessons that covered student’s traditional math, science, English and Kiswahili topics. In addition to standard curriculum, tablets were populated with health information on COVID, content from the Khan Academy and interactive arts and storytelling lessons that offered cultural affirmation to all students and gender empowerment to girls. Lessons on the Windows platform were also included to offer students opportunities to gain hard skills with the potential to increase their professional opportunities and earning potential within the formal economy.
  
  
• Schools outside the Loita Hills region we work in began to inquire about the program as word spread. In August, our Kenyan team traveled over 100 kilometers on motorbikes through heavy rains to Mara Iretet Primary School in the Mara District to teach Kolibri to teachers there and reconnect 15 students to their lessons.

As students in Kenya return to their classrooms in January, 2021, we are returning to our core programs of enrolling children in primary schools, opening secondary school classrooms in partnership with parents and working with community leadership to advocate on behalf of education. While we grieve the lives, livelihoods and opportunities lost due to COVID, we are grateful for the opportunity it provided to work with communities in Kenya to explore paths we were too uncertain to explore before. Teachers in Loita now hope to continue using tablets in the classroom. Pre-COVID, their resources were often limited to a handful of dated textbooks. Through Kolibri, both teachers and students now have access to engaging, interactive, student-centered content for the first time in their lives. Our focus in 2021 is a return to our core programs while continuing to support this new digital learning opportunity for students and teachers. Our goal is to continue to curate content that will enhance and expand student learning while also empowering girls and affirming Maasai student’s cultural identities.

Asante (thank you) from the bottom of our hearts, for the support you’ve given, and continue to give, to support this work –– and the dreams of hundreds of hopeful young people in Kenya.

Links:

• For the Good's COVID Response

“Thank you, For the Good organization, I can now learn at home using the tablet and Kolibri!”

Maria spoke those words to us through our Maasai Programs Coordinator, Josephat Ole Mashati, but they really belong to you. Students like Maria who live in remote Maasai communities without access to electricity or internet have been unable to benefit from the Kenyan government’s intensive effort to get lessons to them through radio, TV and internet. You helped reconnect them to education by funding the launch of an offline learning program that’s allowing them to continue to study during COVID-necessitated school closures. For Maria and over 300 other students, this program has been a lifeline keeping them connected to school. And it couldn’t have happened without your support.

COVID’s impact has been felt by us all. Globally, families in poor, rural communities have been hit particularly hard. In Kenya, the loss of tourism in these regions has devastated people’s means of livelihood. As is true in most humanitarian crisis, COVID has also heightened existent vulnerabilities for girls. Families faced with increased uncertainty and insecurity feel increasing pressure to marry off under-age daughters when they perceive that education is no longer a viable pathway for them. Pressures on girls to engage in transactional sex for necessities and economic survival increase. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that as schools have shuttered around the world, including in Kenya, teenage pregnancies are spiking. This results in significant risks to girls’ health: Complications during pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death for 15–19-year-old girls globally. It also deeply impacts their education and futures: in a recent study, 98% of pregnant teenage girls from nine Kenyan counties were no longer in school.

Keeping girls in school during COVID is critical to their health and safety. As we write this, For the Good staff in Kenya are now heading out on foot and by motobike to load the third month of curriculum onto the tablets of hundreds of students. We are also working with teachers in neighboring districts to connect them to our offline learning program so that hundreds more students can stay engaged with school. Our goal is to prevent widening inequality gaps created by the pandemic and to do our best to keep girls safe and their future dreams alive.

Asante (thank you) from the bottom of our hearts, for the support you’ve given, and continue to give, to create a better world for girls. We'd like to end this update by sharing some words from Gedion Koiye, the Head District School Officer in the Loita Hills region of Kenya where we work. Like Maria's thank you, we feel they truly belong to you.

Links:

• Description of remote education program COVID-19 response