Friends of Ngong Road

Providing education and support to Nairobi children living in poverty whose families are affected by HIV/AIDS.

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Sam receives the highest test score!

This spring, the high school seniors in Kenya took their KCSE exams (similar to the SAT or ACT in the US). It is a series of exams that is extremely rigorous and takes days and days to complete. This year, Sam received the highest score of any student in our program – ever! He scored a solid A. 

We are so excited and proud of his accomplishment. This score means he will likely be recruited by the Kenyan government to attend a prestigious university for his post-secondary studies. We hope this achievement will show the younger students in our program that it is possible to reach their goals and transform their lives through education. Congratulations, Sam! 

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Welcome Carole, our new Executive Director!

Carole Partikokos has joined Friends of Ngong Road as Executive Director, a new position for us. She has a great passion for our mission and is quickly immersing herself in the organization, both in the U.S. and in Kenya. 

After spending the past 15 years in roles of increasing responsibility at Books for Africa, Carole was most recently the Director of Philanthropy there. During her 20 years of professional experience, she has stewarded resources for the advancement of education and social support for African children. Carole’s passion for African children began during her college years when she studied and volunteered in Senegal. She is energized by Friends of Ngong Road’s strategic plan to double our impact in Kenya in the next five years.

Carole is excited about driving our plan to double the number of students served. This includes driving awareness of our program, building our donor base, expanding the number of sponsors,  developing a grants program to build capacity, and leveraging connections in Nairobi to expand internship and employment opportunities.

“I see the dedication of the staff, volunteers, and Kenya team, and look forward to rallying my network to deliver on the mission. I believe that there are enough resources to go around in the world, and by redistributing wealth, expertise, and high expectations, all children have an opportunity to prosper. The dynamic Friends of Ngong Road network delivers on this. I look forward to meeting many of you in the months to come.”

We are planning an informal gathering for people to meet Carole in person.  More details to follow.  

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Parent/Guardian Involvement

Parents/guardians play an important role in the transformation of a student. It is our policy that each student has a supportive parent/guardian during the child’s enrollment in the organization.

During the student selection period, the parent/guardian must fulfill several requirements. In general, they have to ensure that they provide basic needs for the children. They sign a contract agreeing to play their part in the child’s life and to support the organization in any way possible for the child’s success. The contract is refreshed with the parent/guardian at each level of the student’s education.

Every week, the organization holds a Saturday Program where we meet with the students and engage them in group activities. The parents/guardians must ensure that the students attend and participate. 

The parents/guardians also provide the organization with periodic assessment information to assess the child’s progress both at home and at school. This is a way of providing feedback to the organization on how to best support the student.

We hold an Annual General Meeting and the parents/guardians are expected to attend. They receive updates on the program, review their commitment to their child’s education, and are asked for their support in identifying prospective students for the program. It is usually held at the end of the year and they receive Christmas packages of food aid for their families.  

We highly appreciate all our parents/guardians for their continued effort in helping us achieve our students’ success. Their involvement contributes to the success of the students through the web of supportive adults in their lives – parents/guardians, case managers, teachers, and sponsors.

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Improving the donation experience

Our US team has been hard at work rebuilding the system we use to track your donations. When Friends of Ngong Road was founded 16 years ago, most of our supporters mailed checks to our founding board members, and then to our PO Box. Eventually, we were able to start accepting sponsorship donations through automatic credit card withdrawals, but each donation was still manually tracked, responded to, and managed by our team. This led to a huge amount of time spent by our US staff doing simple data entry, and occasionally, making mistakes as humans tend to do. Over the years as we have grown and added more students, created a more robust program, and as inflation and other costs have increased, the amount of time our staff has spent manually typing your donations into our system has increased. 

We realized that this model was no longer sustainable, and our US team went to work to build a system that would support automated donation tracking. There were 16 years of donations to comb through, sort, and organize, then we rebuilt our existing system to support automation, and finally, in the past few weeks, we have been able to launch the newly built automation to our website. You likely won’t notice a difference quite yet (there are big improvements coming your way soon!) in the way you make donations on our website, but behind the scenes your donations now flow directly into our system, allowing our US staff to use their time in more meaningful and impactful ways.

In the next year, we are hoping to bring an account management system to donors through the sponsor portal where sponsors can log in to manage their sponsorships, change credit card information, add additional sponsorships, etc. These types of improvements would not be possible without all the work that has been completed over the past year. As technology continues to improve and become more accessible, and as we as an organization continue to grow and serve more students, we are grateful to have a board that understands the power of technology and is willing to support new ventures to ultimately support the efficiency of the teams both in the US and in Kenya

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TechMates

We consider students fully transformed once they are employed. To enhance their employability, we launched several employment programs, one of them being the TechMates program. TechMates is our new technical training program focused on IT and digital marketing.

Launched in September 2021

The program was started in September 2021. Seven graduates have benefited from this program so far. Each year we aim to recruit at least two interns every six months. During that period, they undergo basic technical training in WordPress website programming and design. After the training, they develop their websites and work on website enhancement and digital marketing for Friends of Ngong Road( FoNR), Ngong Road Children’s Foundation (NRCF), and Karibu Loo as an implementation of the skills acquired during the training. This enhances their technical and interpersonal skills which are key in the professional world.

Assisting NRCF and interacting with FoNR

The TechMates also assist in the day-to-day operations of Ngong Road Children’s Foundation as they master more skills. They assist with teaching some of the younger kids computer basics, running the Saturday Program, as well as troubleshooting technical issues for NRCF staff. Every week they get to meet with two US FoNR board members (Andy Walz and Keith Kale) where they present their weekly accomplishments. The meetings enhance their communication and presentation skills.

Experience with clients

We also seek clients that require freelancing services and provide them with TechMates. Currently,  Lido Nation, referred to TechMates by one of our U.S staff (Michon Garrett), has provided several opportunities to TechMates. Three of the TechMates are working on translating the Lido Nation website into Swahili while two are being trained as web developers and blockchain experts. We are optimistic that the relationship with Lido Nation will benefit more of our students in the near future. 

We welcome anyone that can offer training, funding, and or mentorship to our students to increase their employability.