Water tanks fixing project at Sahwa primary school in Lwanhima ward

Ni Hekima Pekee’s program “Children’s support” has been implemented since 2010.  The aim of this program is to support vulnerable children by providing them school equipment, health support and children’s right protection. We want to make sure that those children are helped, get capacity to access social infrastructure and are part of the society.

During the follow-up of the Sahwa primary school students who we support, we noticed that the school water tanks were broken. More than 1650 students and 32 teachers were at risk because they didn’t have any access to water at all. The head teacher told that they didn’t have any fund to fix the tanks and they had been broken for ten years. We and our intern Anni Pihlaja decided to start fundraising from different children’s and nutrition stakeholders around the world, and after a few days we had collected enough money to fix one big water tank. Now the students and teachers can wash their hands and drink during school hours.

At the moment we are fixing the nursery’s water tank with the fund we got from the Friends of Kenya and Asegelile Investment Limited. We are staying in contact with the stakeholders for more contribution in order to fix the rest of the tanks. Along the project we realized that a fence should be built to protect the water tanks and the school area overall. As a solution we met with the school head teacher and the chairman of the school committee and we agreed that they will build a local fence around the school yard to increase the safety. A fence was built with the help of Mwembe Africa around the nursery and we are continuing fundraising to get a fence around the rest of the school area.

Success story of Liza

"Liza" is a 17-year-old girl living with her family in Nyamagana district in the region of Mwanza. She lives with her mother and four siblings. Three of her older siblings are married and live with their families. Her father ran away from the family when Liza was twelve years old and now he has remarried in another village. The economic situation of the family is poor because the only provider is the mother and she has health issues. Other relatives are not able to support the family.

Liza goes to form one in secondary school and she wants to become a teacher in the future. Liza has been attending Ni Hekima Pekee’s “Wasiliana” project for girls support group since January 2017. In the middle of April 2018 Liza told our workers that she is not going to school anymore. This was because her mother couldn’t afford transport from home to school after the changes of the daladala routes. Now she had to take two daladalas instead of one on the single way.

NIHEP started the follow-up on the same day that Liza told about the situation. We visited the family and decided to support the transport and the missing school materials for Liza so she could go to school next week. After the weekend our field officer visited the family again and found out that Liza still didn’t go to school. She was afraid not finding her name in the student registration since she hadn’t gone to school for the past three months. Also, she hadn’t told the teacher the reason for not coming. The next day we discussed about the situation with Liza and the family and Liza agreed to go to school. We decided to escort her to school because the head teacher was frustrated with the situation. After meeting the head teacher we all agreed that Liza continues going to school.

On May we met the street chairman and he promised to provide some help with the transport occasionally. At the moment Liza is going to school and we continue with the follow-ups.

Children support in Lwanhima ward

The education support program has been implemented in Lwanhima since 2016 and is still going on. In this program Ni Hekima Pekee and the Ward Executive Officer with the support of SKKB Netherland have given full school equipment (school uniforms, exercise books, pens, rulers, rubbers and bags) to the most vulnerable children. This year there were 40 children in total; 16 boys and 24 girls between the ages 6 to 13. They were from 30 poor-low income earning households in Sahwa and Buhongwa schools.

Table 1. Gender and grade of the children who received the education support

Grade	Female	Male	In total
1	4	1	5
2	11	9	20
3	3	3	6
4	2	1	3
5	2	1	3
6	2	1	3

Unfortunately some of the identified most vulnerable children were left out from education support because of the limited fund of the organization. The organization aims to extend on helping more vulnerable children in education in the future.