Kenya's blog

It’s a new approach for a new year at Ondati Secondary in Kenya, as the school looks to push on and improve the businesses on site. In order to arouse greater enthusiasm for the businesses from the students, the school decided to simply let the girls choose which different ‘business club’ they would like to join. With the newly formed ‘Beauty Salon Business Club’, the ‘Volunteer Friendship Club’ and a good harvest of nearly ripe pineapples, means we are witnessing much more enthusiasm toward our enterprises this year.

The rain just keeps coming and Ondati feels like an island in a sea of mud. However, this doesn’t stop progress and a lot has happened this month.

The beginning of the month was exam time and the boarders could be seen studying late in the classrooms late into the night under the light of a new battery bought with project income. The students kept up their hard work in the projects, despite the academic pressures, illustrating that partaking in the school businesses is becoming a routine for Ondati girls.

Ben Otieno is the Project Coordinator at Ondati Secondary School and works closely to manage each business by providing labour, handling custom

Victoria Ouma started as a form 1 student at Ondati Girls in January 2011. She has five siblings at home, who her parents have to pay school fees for. She comes from a town about 2 hours from Ondati, where all the secondary schools charge very high fees that her parents cannot afford. Worried that she would not be able to attend secondary school because of this, she was very relieved when her grandfather found Ondati Girls for her.

With the arrival of the new term and all the students and teachers back on campus, we’re excited to move forward with our plans and

This month the focus in Ondati has been on increasing girls’ involvement in the school businesses. It is difficult to find more hours in a day packed by the Kenyan Curriculum but the staff here have designated time before and after school for both extra business classes and manual project work.

We’ve been in Ondati, Kenya, for 6 weeks now and time is flying by!  Our time here so far has mostly consisted of creating awareness of the TAMTF self-sufficient school model.  All students and staff can now detail the main objectives for this year.  Everyone is excited to improve current projects, as well as start new ones, and we have allotted time for project training in the school day.  To date we have had multiple project meetings with students, committee, teaching staff and general staff to discuss the implementation of the model.

One week down, although so much has happened in this time it feels like much longer.  After a busy few days in Kisumu, trying to stock