The impact of GTL at the family and community level
May 26, 2021
Celebrating 25 years of educating girls and young women in East Africa
April 5, 2022I am delighted to let you know that all schools in Kenya and Tanzania were opened in the summer of 2021, after the closures that took place in March 2020 due to Covid-19. Schools in Uganda will reopen in January 2022.
In earlier years, the coordinators on the ground in East Africa typically recruit new scholars in their first year of secondary school. When they began recruiting new GTL scholars this past summer, they found that the economic hardships from Covid-19 had affected adolescent girls already enrolled in secondary schools. This year, we decided to step in and offer support to those bright girls who had lost their financial support. Of our new GTL scholars, 14 percent are in their second year or above, and have either lost their guardians to Covid-19 or their guardians have lost their income sources due to Covid-19.
Additionally, in pre-Covid years, the coordinators only recruited new scholars who had just completed elementary school, but this year, we decided to make an exception for a very worthy candidate. One of our scholars, Anne Baraza sat for the Kenya Certificate in Primary Education (KCPE) after she completed elementary school six years ago in 2015. She never joined secondary school. Both her parents abandoned her when she was a baby. In the six years since completing elementary school, she has been doing casual jobs on neighbors’ plots of land, receiving food in exchange for money that she has then contributed to the household of the woman who took her in. Despite these setbacks, Anne has remained committed to continuing her formal education. We felt Anne was a worthy candidate to receive support from GTL to attend high school.
Anne Baraza at her home during school holidays, October 2021.
Please send us a gift to keep Anne in school for the next 4 years, along with the 67 other eager and grateful girls who joined high school this year.
For more stories about the bright but financially challenged young girls and women we support in East Africa read our newsletter here https://growththroughlearning.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/GTL-Fall-Newsletter-November-9-2021_-Final.pdf
