Emergency COVID-19 support for Kenyan children

Dear valued supporters,

At our Seed of Hope Programme, we have witnessed immesuarable growth and impact past the Covid 19 pandemic.

At the end of 2020, we were able to do a needs assessment that enabled us to overhaul our model, reduce training duration for our vocational courses and introduce a new course on Entrepreneurship, Financial Literacy and Computer skills that the communities we work with needed to be able to create employment more quickly for the students after graduating. These changes took effect in 2021 and in July 2021, we enrolled the first cohort of students after the overhaul.

With your support, we were also able to introduce childcare vouchers for young mothers that enables them to have childcare support while they attend their training and complete. They also get free monlthy supplies of menstrual hygiene packs and daily free lunches at the Seed of Hope training centres.

Through your generous support, we have been able to give opportunity to more than 300 young mothers in the last 2 years to get the Seed of Hope free training, get the skills and transition to employment. This has enabled them to provide for themselves, their small children and their siblings and other family members in need.

Precious* is one of the young mothers graduate enrolled in our Kitui Centre in July 2021 to take a course in Fashion and Design. She had been married off at a young age and unfortunately, her husband passed away leaving her as a sole bread winner for herself and their now 5 year old child. Having not finished her formal education, it was very hard for her to get any meaningful jobs for their sustenance.

When she heard of Seed of Hope, despite backlash and no support from her husband's family, she enrolled herself for a Fashion and Design Course and was determined to get skills that would enable her to get employment and provide for her child and herself.

The childcare vouchers given at Seed of Hope enabled her to get childcare for her child to be able to attend her training. She also got free lunches daily at Seed of Hope, weekly supply of relief food packs and a monthly provision of sanitary towels which enabled her to finish her training.

After training, she was able to find employment in a nearby township in a fashion shop that she was interning in. She has since been able to move with her child from the village and live within the township where she works, been able to enroll her child into an Early Childhood school, sustain herself and her child and is saving towards opening up her own business.

We have many success stories of young mothers like Precious whose lives have been transformed and they now live with Dignity and Hope through the Opportunities availed to them to better their lives by Seed of Hope!

All these lives wouldn't have been changed without your generous support to the work of Raising Futures Kenya over the years. We are very grateful to you all for enabling us to make this change happen!

Please visit our Websites below to see more impact stories and the change we're driving by enabling so many young people in Kenya access self and salaried employment after their training at Seed of Hope.

www.raisingfutureskenya.org.uk

www.seedofhopekenya.org

*Graduate name changed for privacy

With warm Regards,

Mary