Kenya School Project - Sharing the Excess

KSP History

Education Empowers. Kenyan children and adults want to earn and learn. The Kenya School Project was established to boost Kenya’s poorest unto the bottom rung of the economic ladder by learning and earning. The Project started in 2004 because a Wisconsin woman, Mary Stusek, believed with all her heart that to ignore Africa’s poverty is genocide from a distance.

When the Government of Kenya agreed to provide free primary schooling for all children in 2003, a good idea ran into unexpected problems. The Kenyan government signed on to the UN Millennium Development Goals [UN MDG], one of which is to provide free primary education to the world’s children by 2015. Kenya eliminated the existing tuition fee of $16, a small sum but enough to keep many children from an education.

In 2003 a million new students came to school, students from the poorest families for whom $16 was a fortune. Schools are over-crowded with few books, no libraries, no educational materials, electricity or running water. The system is stretched to breaking. Many students are so hungry they can’t concentrate.

Kenya School Project realizes for most Kenyans education ends after primary school. Kenya School Project and its partner Help Self Help Centre attack this problem by providing job skills. Students attend vocational classes at the Enterprise Development Centres and in the field. Our students are in their teens and in their sixties, women and men, married and single. The common denominator: our students qualify by their extreme poverty.

Kenya School Project was established to provide the necessary tools for those Kenyans who live in extreme poverty and need extended to them a lifeline of learning, hope and opportunity.