Support Arloste Ganze Academy

My name is Emilia Cooper, and during the summer of my gap year I spent two months volunteering as a teacher at Arloste Ganze Academy in Ganze, Kilifi, on the coast of Kenya. Ganze is a small village in a semi arid climate zone, so agricultural production is limited. Ganze is a pastoralist community and, like many pastoralist communities, has a high rate of poverty and illiteracy. Community members in Ganze have limited access to clean water, food, and education.

Many kids in this community do not have access to education due to extreme poverty. Students at Arloste Ganze Academy are fortunate to receive a quality education in a conducive learning environment. Administrators at Arloste have worked hard to cultivate opportunities for their students through education. Because Arloste offers the best education available in Ganze, many families want to send their kids to learn here. The teaching staff is overwhelmed by high volume of students in their classes, and they lack the necessary resources to accommodate more students. The school requires funds to purchase new desks and chairs, and hire a new teacher to accommodate the new students. Because many students board at the school, Arloste also needs to purchase new beds for kids. Boarders are currently sharing beds, and some even sleep on the floor. The school also needs to hire a matron to sleep in the girls' dorm to take care of them and keep them safe.

Many students at Arloste Ganze Academy come from vulnerable homes, where they cannot afford to eat, so the school sponsors many kids to provide meals for vulnerable kids during the school day. Due to a lack of funds, many vulnerable kids from the community have not been recruited for this program. Many families in Ganze also lack the funds to pay school fees, so it is essential that Arloste accesses funding to sponsor the education of more kids. 

Before coming to Ganze, I was able to raise funds to buy necessary supplies for the school. With raised funds, I bought paints, crayons, manilla papers, markers, pens, notebooks, office supplies, and sports equipment for the students. I was also able to have tap water installed at the school, after the school had been surviving on rainwater for two years. The school requires further funding to pay monthly water bills.

There are many unfinished projects at the school such as, a kitchen and dining room, a staff bathroom, repairs of the playground. Arloste has goals to develop income generating projects, such as real estate and rabbit rearing. I will be returning to Ganze this summer with two more volunteers to continue working on the projects I initiated last summer. We will be focusing on improving the living conditions of boarding students, as they sleep in overcrowded rooms with little protection from dust from the road. We will be working to fill the library that was constructed last summer with books. We will also be improving the pluming system in the compound.To sustain these ongoing projects, we need funds.

For more information about the Ganze community and the foundation dedicated to helping community members, please visit the website of the Lchokuti Foundation. The foundation is committed to community advancement through education.