Akili Preparatory School and Library

Akili Preparatory School is a Kindergarten through 8th Grade school for girls aged between 3 to 15 years in Obunga Slums, Kisumu, Kenya. Akili opened in January 2012 with over 80 underprivileged children in the church hall and currently serves 96 children in preschool through 1st Grade. We add additional 20 girls as we expand to the next class each year until we reach 8th grade in 2020. Our school provides quality education, school uniforms, shoes, text books, backpacks, stationery, computer training and food for the orphans and vulnerable girls in the community. The school also strictly employs women as teachers as a way of empowering them through job creation.

View of Obunga from the Akili Library

The Mission

Akili Preparatory School prepares girls in preschool through 8th grade to get adequate knowledge and skills for success in education and in life, and to develop strong leadership character that will ultimately enable them to emancipate themselves from the vicious cycle of poverty in the slum and be the change they would want to see in their community.

The Need

With abject poverty in Obunga slum, few people can educate and provide the basic needs for their children. Majority of the residents are young women who are teenage mothers having been taken advantage of by the men who abandon them with children to take care of. They cannot afford the nominal fees charged as tuition by most schools despite the free primary education policy by the government.

So many children drop out of school and end up on the street. They don't have enough to eat and they can't afford to go to school, so they spend their time scavenging for scrap metals which they sell to local dealers for money to buy food. This makes poverty a cycle, passed on from parents to the kids as teenage mothers grow up without an education and have children who they cannot educate or provide for.

Akili Prep School is the only girls’ school in Obunga slum. There is thus a great need for a model school for girls in the community. Kenya has made rapid progress toward the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education, in part due to the elimination of school fees in 2003. Enrollment in primary schools has risen over the years. Yet this progress creates its own new challenges of higher pupil-teacher ratios and overstretching of physical facilities/ overcrowded classrooms with class sizes of 100 or more which leads to declined examination performance in some primary schools. Like most slums in the country, children living in poverty in Obunga, particularly girls, have had no choice but to attend public mixed schools that perform poorly in national examinations condemning them to a life of perpetual poverty as they are locked out of good high schools and institutions of higher learning.

The Akili Library

Akili Library is the only Library in Obunga slums serving over 500 children and youth in the community. The Library was started in response to the lack of a conducive-studying environment, which is miserably lacking in Obunga slums hence denying the community members especially school going children and youth reference and other reading materials, which enhances their knowledge levels.

The Impact

Educating girls changes their life trajectories. At Akili we identify and sponsor needy girls at an early age when they join Pre-K and give them quality education and set them on their path to prosperity. Research shows that knowledge and skills learnt in childhood are more likely to be retained and practiced in future life and therefore offering sustainable solutions to existing problems. The child's mind is receptive to new ideas and technologies. Studies have documented that school children are effective change agents; whatever is learned is likely to be transferred to the community. We seek to identify the girls right at the point when they enter pre-school and support and allow them to thrive. An educated girl marries later, has fewer children that she can take care of, and earns more wages hence eradicating the vicious circle of poverty in Obunga slums.

Our vision is to use Akili Preparatory School as a model for the provision of high quality education for girls which can be rolled-out to other schools to help improve student performance and achieve gender equality and empower women in Kenya.

To learn more, please visit: http://akilischool.weebly.com