Support the Mwamba Foundation
Kitale is a largely rural region and lies in the north of Kenya bordering on Sudan and several other countries. The region is quite poor, and the Kitale Diocese strains to help its 150,000 rapidly growing active members. The Mwamba Foundation partners with the Kenyan Church to offer scholarships to assist with the secondary education of girls and very poor boys in the diocese.
St. Matthew’s participates in this program, pooling our donations to sponsor students. It costs about $400 per year to educate a high school student in Kenya. Each year, for the past several years, we have supported over a dozen students enabling them to complete their high school education. We sponsored seventeen students in 2019. Mwamba Foundation is a separate non-profit, but our parishioners have always been a significant part of the governing board and our congregation is the largest single source of sponsorship for Mwamba Foundation.
The Mwamba students have been significantly affected by the coronavirus, as Kenyan schools were suspended as of April 1 of 2020. Students could not return to school until January 2021, and then were sent home in March when another wave of COVID-19 cases hit Kenya. The schools are slated to reopen in May of this year, and the 2020 school year (which should have paralleled the calendar year) will be completed in July of 2021. The 2021 school year is planned for July 2021-March 2022, and the 2022 school year should be able to run April-December 2022. School terms will run with no breaks.
While COVID-19 has affected learning for children in the United States, it has been devastating for Kenyan children. There is no infrastructure for virtual schooling, so the children have lost nine months of education, and are just now trying to make that up. The pandemic has hit the lower income classes particularly hard, and more families than ever are struggling to pay school fees. The need for scholarships, especially for girls, is more present than ever.
St. Matthew’s has supported Mwamba for 20 years, as Father Dave Robinson was instrumental in its founding. We typically run our fundraising campaign in November, but delayed this year until we knew when the students could return to school. We are now asking for your contributions to fund the 2021 school year, which will begin in July. The cost for a full scholarship is still $400 per child, but recall that we pool our donations, so no amount is too small. We have supported 15 children for the past two years, and hope to do so again.
Finally, we ask your prayers for our three Form Four students, who are taking critical national exams (similar to British “A levels”), which will determine their ability to attend university or technical college. Their names are Norah Long’or, Daniel Mukelima and Tecla Chepengat. These young people are under tremendous pressure after having missed significant portions of their last year of school.
Donate online here:
Send a check to the parish office, or include it in your offering envelope:
- Please make check payable to: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church
- Please indicate “MWAMBA” in the check memo field
We ask that you kindly submit support by May 22, 2021.