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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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 a number of 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 own personal 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 assists 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 in 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 presentations 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.

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Meet our new Case Manager: Wence

“The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet” – this quote would best describe Wenceslaus Njiri right from childhood. Wenceslaus, mostly known as “Wence” by his peers, was born and raised in Ngando, Dagoretti. He lived with his grandmother who was the sole breadwinner and had quite a difficult childhood mainly because his grandmother struggled to provide for him and the entire family. Wence joined the Ngong Road program in 2009 and his case manager described him as being “polite, well-disciplined, and impressive”.

His leadership skills were seen right from High School as he was a dorm captain and the hockey team captain while at Parklands High School. He took major steps even as a young person to become a visionary leader. He was also one of the instrumental and key people that pioneered the Youth Peer Providers (YPP) program as part of the students’ Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) training.

Wence is loved by especially the youngest students in the program and takes pride in being a major contributor and facilitator of the Saturday programs. During his time at Kabete National Polytechnic College where he studied social work and community development and at the same time, he still made time to volunteer as a facilitator in the Saturday program. He would interact with the kids and created a strong bond, not yet knowing that he would soon get the chance to work with the kids as their case manager.

His love and commitment to work during his internship at the organization is one of the factors that led to him being hired as a case manager in the primary department at the start of 2022. He loves working as a case manager and he describes it as a way of showing appreciation to the organization that changed his life and enabled him to get an education. Wence hopes to accomplish a lot for the organization and for himself as he maneuvers through and explores his career.

Thanks to Friends of Ngong Road and Ngong Road Children’s Foundation for transforming this young man’s life through education.

Welcome, Wence!

Friends of Ngong Road 2020 Kenya Visit – day 3 – Saturday Program – Introduction to Ultimate

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Karibu Corner

Karibu Loo has rebuilt the business and is ready for a new year

With the country’s ongoing vaccination campaign and following the relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions, the Kenyan economy is gradually recovering from Covid-19 impacts. 

Rebuilding the Business after Covid-19

The impact of Covid -19 has resulted in 2021 being a rebuilding year for Karibu Loo.  In 2021 our priority was on building our long-term rental business which year to date is over 60% of total revenue.  Our primary marketing tool was digital advertising campaigns through Google and social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter).  These campaigns have been very successful with almost 80% of our sales, including long term commercial, coming through direct inquiry without a sales intermediary.

Long-Term Business is our mainstay

Since the onset of the pandemic, long-term business (primarily construction companies) has been our mainstay in revenue and has enabled us to survive through the pandemic. Short term business is primarily event-based which has been slower to return.   

During the last three quarters of 2021, we recorded a rapid increase in long-term revenue peaking at 25 cabins per day in the fourth quarter. In recent months, the long-term has contributed almost 70% of the total monthly revenue for Karibu Loo, the highest level we have recorded since inception of Karibu Loo. We believe this trend will progress next year, creating a solid revenue generation base. 

2022 Business Outlook is bright

The coming year outlook remains uncertain and contingent on the impact of the Covid-19 variant (Omicron). We anticipate serving the BATUK (British Military Training Unit Kenya) organization.  They train troops in Nanyuki, about a four-hour drive from Nairobi. BATUK usually schedules military training in phases throughout the year so we anticipate supplying at least 40 cabins per day for three months beginning in January with the possibility of extending through the rest of the year. Despite the complex operations cost behind the business, it provides a significant revenue boost.

Staff Update on Covid-19 

Due to the nature of our work, we encouraged all our staff to get vaccinated in order to participate in the prevention and reduction of Covid-19 risks and also protect our clients while in service. Currently all our staff are 100% fully vaccinated (complete doses).