Better late than never, here is an update on our Directors’ adventures this past January! Our Oxford Directors, Pia and Camille, and Deputy Director, Ahmed, travelled to Nairobi to meet up with our Directors there, Patricia and Yuri, for a few days to catch-up on projects and attend important meetings. Their take-ways will be presented here in two blog posts, starting with their progress on mentorship.
Our Directors, from left to right: Yuri, Pia, Patricia, and Camille
“Our mentorship programme is now our longest-running project, and we are proud to say that in its first year of implementation, it has had very positive results. During the week in Nairobi, we went to visit the school in which we worked with 80 mentees in 2019. We met there with the Deputy Principal and the Guidance and Counseling Teacher, who welcomed us with delicious tea and sandwiches. The school expressed gratitude for the programme, seeing that the children who had been mentored were now more confident, more open, speaking up and talking to their teachers even outside of class, which was rare previously. Grades had also augmented, contributing to sending three students to university, and several others to vocational colleges. This was fantastic to hear!
Going forward, the school wishes for us to integrate more academic lessons in our programme, having noticed their positive effect. Our Mentorship teams, under the leadership of Hannah in Oxford and Mathew in Nairobi, are therefore now restructuring the programme to accommodate this. Although we were asked to take on the whole school for next year, our capacity as a student organisation made it impossible, but we have expanded the programme to take in 150 mentees this time around. We keep in our minds that our aim is to attain proof of concept - to show that this model works. We feel confident given the obtained results that we are creating this possibility, and that in the future other organisations can implement the programme on a larger scale.
During the week, we also met with Amani Kibera, our new partner with whom we plan to expand our project to another school. This would allow us to test our model in a different environment - a different area of Nairobi called Kibera - with new students and new mentors, to see if we achieve similar results. Amani Kibera has been very enthusiastic about the project, helping us with training, and for communications with the school. Unfortunately, our expansion has however been postponed, as the school we meant to partner with is going through significant structural changes and integrating other schools. This does not mean the end though...We shall be patient and wait for the right time to work with these great new partners!
Signing our Memorandum of Agreement with Amani Kibera
Finally, we also met with our original partner CoWA (Companionship of Works Organisation), who we work with at our first school. Together we reassessed our partnership in the past year and decided on a way forward. We have now reached a new agreement in which CoWA will participate in specifically planned sessions to teach on their expertise: vocational training. We are very excited to continue working with them on this, as our mentees need to be presented with as wide a range of options as possible for their path after school, so that they can decide on the future they want to have.”
At CoWA headquarters
Coming soon, our progress on the Menstrual Health Management project!