Teacher Rose Mureka of Red Rose School, Litworld, and the Bronxville School are featured in an article on a collaboration through electronic books, email, and letters that bring American and Kenyan children closer together as they learn about life in the slums outside Nairobi and in the surburbs of New York City. Click on the NYT banner above to readthe April 27th New York Times article by clicking here!
CoKF December Newsletter
01.13.2009
The CoKF December Newsletter is now online! Access or download it in a PDF format here: CoKF December Newsletter
CoKF Announces $50,000 Scholarship Winners
01.05.2009
The New Year has come with a pleasant surprise for some of last year’s Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination candidates.
Eleven of them at Nairobi’s Kibera slum, six of them girls, were on Friday given secondary education scholarships by non-profit organisation Children of Kibera Foundation (CoKF).
The organisation decided that because the pupils performed well in an environment fraught with little food and comfort as well as inadequate reading materials shows that there is a great potential that could go to waste due to poverty if not tapped.
The CoKF intends to spend an estimated Sh3.75 million on the high school studies for the bright, but poor, pupils.
“It is very sad that an additional 20 pupils may not have the opportunity to pursue their education, yet they scored over 400 (out of a possible 500) marks,” the foundation chairman, Mr Kenneth Okoth, told the Saturday Nation.
His prayer is that private companies will identify deserving cases in the slum and pay their fees, give them pocket money and do shopping for them.
“These bodies (firms) have to do something to change the face of this community and get the residents out of poverty,” he said.
The beneficiaries are mainly orphans or children from single parents. The CoKF is already sponsoring four secondary school students and will be paying all their four years’ fees.
The organisation is registered in the US and was founded by Mr Okoth, a former pupil of Kibera’s Olympic primary school. “People helped me to get where I am,” said Mr Okoth, a US-based university lecturer.
“They did not give me food; they paid my fees as they know education is important. So, I have also decided to help these children to succeed.”
Olympic’s best KCPE candidate, Philtricia Barasa Were, who scored 434 marks, is among the beneficiaries.
“I am so happy,” said the 14-year-old. “This will now make me realise my dream of becoming a doctor.”
Her father, a single parent who lost all his property in the post-election violence of early last year, said the scholarship was the only way his daughter would make it in life.
Voice of America TV Features Red Rose School
12.05.2008
Red Rose School Offers Hope to Kibera Slum Orphans
By Vincent Makori, Voice of America TV
Washington, D.C., 25 November 2008
In Nairobi, Kenya, thousands of orphaned children in the Kibera slums do not go to school. They simply cannot afford the fees and have little hope of a better life. But thanks to a small group of donors, including some in the United States, some children will realize their dream of an education.
Eleven-year-old Brian Amurama lives with his grandmother, Elizabeth Aluda, in a single room in the Kibera slums of Nairobi. They share it with Brian’s four-year-old sister Tulen, six-year-old brother Bradley and an adult relative.
Brian starts his day by helping his younger siblings get ready for school. He serves them breakfast, usually just a cup of black tea, before they start the long walk to school.
It takes the children approximately 20 minutes to navigate the busy morning streets to get to school.
Brian’s hopes for a good education depend on a small private school established in 1998 by a retired Kenyan school teacher.
Protase Buluma is the deputy director at Red Rose Nursery and Children Center. He says the school is like a drop in the ocean, but it is giving hope to these kids.
“Specifically,” he says, “ we cater for the needs of the orphaned children in the slums, who have nobody to take care of them. So far we have 40 orphans out of a population of 89 kids.”
Brian’s parents died in 2004. That’s when he and his little brother and sister went to live with their grandmother. Elizabeth Aluda is among hundreds of thousands of Kenyans who live in extreme poverty in Kibera, on the south side of the capital Nairobi.
Despite their circumstances, the children have reason for hope. They are enthusiastic and eager to learn through the various teaching methods the teachers have developed at Red Rose School.
A United Nations report says many orphans in Kibera end up on the streets with no formal education or family support system. With time they become part of the rising statistics of crime related deaths, sexual abuse and the widening cycle of poverty. For the few who go to the Red Rose school, they get more than reading and writing there.
Red Rose School Deputy Director Protase Buluma says “Where they would have lacked education they now receive it here. Where they would have lacked nutrition, they get it here. Where they would have lacked love and hope, they are now getting it here.”
Red Rose runs its programs with the support of a group of private donors. Ken Okoth is one of them. He grew up in poverty in the slums of Kibera, but now teaches at the Potomac School, a private institution in northern Virginia outside Washington.
Okoth says his personal life experience motivates him to help the kids of Kibera: “I can’t just sit back and think, `I made it, am successful, I will move on with life.’ I know at every stage, somebody gave something to me and I can never pay them back for the help they gave me.”
Okoth has enlisted the help of fellow teachers and students at his school in Virginia to raise funds for the children in Kenya. Some of the teachers and students visited Red Rose School late last year to deliver education materials, including lap-tops and books.
Red Rose school is a small oasis of hope in an expansive landscape of poverty and despair . Many residents of Kibera say they hope that Kenya’s government will allocate more resources to ensure no child lacks education and opportunities to advance.
Okoth says this will change the future of the children: “Being poor is just a circumstance where you start in life, but it is not your destiny and it can change.”
Friends of Red Rose School Visit US Congress
04.26.2008
In many countries across the world, the struggle just to survive means getting a good education just is not an option. One group of activists that included Children of Kibera Foundation Members Ken Okoth, Allison Fisk, and Chris Coe, wants to change that and they took their message to Capitol Hill during the Global Campaign for Education Action Week. Click Here to Watch the Fox 5 TV report by Beth Parker.
Ken Okoth, 30, who teaches at the Potomac School in McLean, left his home in the slums on the outskirts of Nairobi in 1997 for a scholarship to St. Lawrence University in Upstate New York. He went on to get a master’s degree, marry a fellow teacher and settle in Washington. But strong ties to his home remain. Not only does Okoth support his mother and several family members, but for the past several months, he has been the de facto head of the Red Rose school in his old neighborhood that serves orphans and other impoverished children of the slums that ring Nairobi.
Cary Academy Students Help Red Rose
02.05.2008
Students Making a Difference a World Away
01.23.2008
At McLean’s Potomac School, a desire for charity has brought students face to face with the harsh realities of politics in the developing world.
Last summer, a group of Potomac School students, teachers and parents visited the Red Rose Nursery and Children’s Centre in Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya. The group brought gifts of textbooks, uniforms and money for scholarships to Red Rose.
Ken Okoth talks Education and Peace on NPR
01.18.2008
Ken Okoth grew up in a slum on the outskirts of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. But he found a way out of the cycle of poverty, winning a scholarship to an American university, and going on to become a teacher at a prestigious local high school. He joins Kojo to discuss the violence in his native country, and why he believes education is a source of– and possible solution to– the political turmoil.
Expatriate Helps Family and Community
01.12.2008
As the killing mounted in Kenya, Ken Okoth spent the last few days making desperate calls to his family in the Kibera slum of Nairobi.
Okoth grew up poor in Kibera, but he got out — first to an American university on scholarship, and then to a job teaching history in McLean, Va.
When mobs angry over the result of Kenya’s disputed presidential election began burning shanties and killing members of rival tribes, Okoth knew it was time for his family to leave…