10/08/2019
The mentorship scheme is Kite’s first project and incredibly, is coming up to its mid-year stage! This means there is lots of evaluation to be done, a key pillar of Kite’s model. In case you haven’t heard or seen about the project: here is a summary in 2 key points.
What is the Mentorship Scheme?
The mentorship scheme is a weekly mentorship programme run by University of Kenyatta and Nairobi student volunteers who act as mentors, to 68 mentees at a high school in Nairobi. Mentees and mentors meet once a week throughout the year, with each term focusing on a specific area. In the first term, the focus was on building the relationship between mentees and mentors and developing academic skills, amongst others. In the second term, careers and college pathway awareness was covered. Next term will be a group project, decided by the mentees to build positive peer to peer relationships, and one-on-one sessions between the mentors and mentees.
Why the scheme was developed?
Research highlighted that there was a serious issue of a high rate of high- school drop outs, with students leaving with minimal or no qualifications. Alongside this, baseline surveys on the mentees highlighted that less than half knew where to find careers advice. The mentorship scheme is able to utilise university students who act as role models, with recent experience of challenges faced by the mentees.
Our plans!
This trip will be a busy week of researching new ideas for projects, meeting potential handover partners and evaluating the mentorship programme at its mid-year point.
Evaluation
We have written and will be collecting surveys in from all the mentees. The aims of these will be to a) compare statistics such as percentage awareness of careers advice, with the baseline surveys b) measure any developments in student’s self – assessed soft skills. This is key for informing the next steps of the project, building into the sessions topics the mentees have found helpful and those they would like more help with.
Alongside this, we will be meeting all the mentors to hear their feedback on various areas such as the support Kite offers them, the time commitment, session content. The mentors are themselves delivering each session and are best placed to inform us of how we can build upon and improve the mentorship scheme, in these relatively early days.
Handover
Meetings will take place with potential handover partners and charities working in mentorship programmes already. This will be a chance to share experiences and to look to the future in a year’s time where we hope to work with a charity to handover – watch this space!
This trip should be a brilliant chance to really see and hear from the Nairobi committee how our first project has been going. Mentors, mentees and schools will all be able to help us to inform the next steps and ultimately, scale up effectively!
Pippa
(Oxford committee)