Educate & Empower 1200 Girls in the Nairobi Slums

As we continue to report on our programs, we want to update you this time with one of our future pilot projects. Safe Spaces programs wants to tackle key areas identified by the World Health Organization that have serious consequences for female health, like malnutrition. 

As we are trying to expand and get more girls to play in our basketball teams and participate in competitions to win educational scholarships, we came to realize that some girls are at a disadvantage from early on, due to the lack of proper food in the first years of their life. This may affect their body growth and cause stunting, disqualifying them for eligibility in a high-school basketball team. 

 Many families in the slums do not have the means to buy enough food for themselves and their children. Eating healthy and nutritious food on a daily basis is a luxury. The symptoms of malnutrition, such as small stature or lethargy (anaemia), are often misunderstood in the girls’ families. Adequate nutrition is especially critical for women: it wreaks havoc on their own health, and also on their children’s.   

 Our objective is to fight malnutrition through regular health checks of weight, height, and BMI, coupled with nourishing meals to help our basketball team players and peer educators grow better, built muscle tone and improve their general level of health. This is a new pilot project, which we see as a stepping stone to better sports performance and general well-being.

We hope to establish the metrics we need; that’s why we want to hire a visiting nurse and buy measuring equipment for recording the Height and Weight of our initial pilot group participants as well as calculating the BMI and z-scores. We want to know how many of our girls deviate from the standard growth norm of the Kenyan population and organize the support for the most severe cases.

  We want to supplement this with an awareness campaign: the nurse will also provide dietary advice, not only to our basketball players and our peer educators (pilot group), but also to the mothers. Outreach to the parents and the community is essential to built the awareness about the importance of proper nutrition. This will of course take into account the economical means and the cultural food traditions.  

You can help us as always by donating to this pilot project. Together with our supporters, we hope to make our girls at Safe Spaces healthier and better able to make the right food choices, to sustain themselves and their families in the future.