Friends of Ngong Road

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

By Leave a Comment

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.

By Leave a Comment

Employment Initiatives

In 2021, Friends of Ngong Road conducted a survey of our first 113 alumni and learned that 80% of alumni had one or more jobs between May 2020 – May 2021.  This was an especially challenging time for employment due to the effects of COVID-19 restrictions on the Kenyan economy.  While encouraging to learn such a high percentage of alumni had had jobs, at the time of the survey, only 46% of respondents were employed. Among those employed 76% had a job in the formal economy. Among the unemployed, 90% had worked in the informal economy, and when COVID hit, their work disappeared.  

New emphasis on employment, an updated mission statement

These results led our board of directors to conclude we must do better. Since our inception, we have understood that Kenya’s formal economy has very high unemployment levels (about 40%) and that this last stage of life transformation, employment,  would be most challenging.  We have now made “employment” a fourth program pillar in our overall strategy (along with Education, Student Health & Well-Being and Supportive Community) and updated our mission statement to reflect our increased focus on helping graduates get and keep a job.  Our updated mission statement is:

We empower Nairobi children living in poverty to transform their lives through education and support, leading to employment.

Programs to support employment objective 
We currently have several initiatives in place or in development that support our goal of ensuring 75% of the alumni are employed within six months of graduation.  Some of these programs begin in high school, such as Life Skills training and learning about career options.  Other programs are focused on high school and post-secondary graduates, including:

  • Job placement through support of the Kenyan Board of Directors who make referrals to organizations within their network.
  • Karibu Loo Associate program– Karibu Loo (KL) is a portable sanitation business (owned by FoNR) that hires our graduates as part-time associates to help with the operations of the business, learning skills of organization, time management and working as part of a team. Karibu Loo has also hired graduates for full time roles in marketing and operations.  Since inception, more than 120 graduates have been employed by KL.
  • Sales Academy – an intensive two-month sales training and six-month paid internship through a partnership with Yusudi Sales Academy. Two students will be joining this program in April as a pilot to see how successful it will be.
  • TechMates Program – A tech internship program where STEM Graduates are taken through an “on the job training” on digital marketing, website development and management using WordPress, Google Ads, as well as advanced programming. The interns are later linked with external companies for contract jobs. 
  • Entrepreneurship training – Targeting  alumni who are interested in starting a small enterprise by providing basic business creation training and linking them to funding opportunities. 

Elsewhere in this newsletter, you will find more information about the TechMates Program. In the next five years, we expect to launch more initiatives focused on helping graduates get jobs.  We know that when you begin life in extreme poverty the only way your life is truly transformed is if you get (and keep) a job.

By 1 Comment

Two Remarkable Young People: Siblings Lorine and Emmanuel

By Susan Plimpton

Almost 15 years ago, we accepted the sponsorship of Lorine, at that time a young girl of about 10 years of age.  When I met her, she had a big smile on her face but found me a bit intimidating and looked down at the ground when I shook her hand.  Her father had died recently from AIDS and her mother, also positive, was weakened by an illness.  Lorine was helping with cooking and washing while also going to school.  Even then her mother knew that a good education was the only possible way to give Lorine a chance at a better life and thus applied for sponsorship in the Ngong Road program. Over the years, Lorine gradually became more self-confident. We loved communication through email and had fun times shopping when I was in Nairobi. Several years after “adopting” Lorine I learned that her brother, Emmanuel, was also available for sponsorship and we agreed to take him on as well. Emmanuel was a little more reserved but very motivated academically in primary school which enabled him to enter a competitive secondary school. 

Both Lorine and Emmanuel were accepted by Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology for a two-year certificate program after they completed secondary school, Lorine in Business Studies and Emmanuel in Business Information Technology. Upon completing the program, Lorine self-financed herself to go on for a 4 year Bachelor’s degree in Business Studies and now works in a financial position at British East African Tobacco Company in Nairobi.


Emmanuel is an IT intern at the Ngong Road Children’s Foundation, one of the first “TechMates”. He is so proficient in information technology and cyber security that he has a second internship at Lido Nation as an Intern/Junior Developer.  Emmanuel has also been invited by the Swiss non-profit organization, United People Global, to participate in a week-long leadership and sustainability program this summer at Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership in Rockland, Maine. He is hoping to obtain his U.S. visa to attend.

 My husband David and I visited Lorine and Emmanuel pre-pandemic and were so impressed and proud of the young adults they have become.  Both have matured into self-confident and poised individuals who have every intention of contributing to the development of their country. They truly are examples of the transformation that can be achieved by the children sponsored by Friends of Ngong Road at the Ngong Road Children’s Foundation.

 Lorine says . . .

My experience of being a beneficiary of the NRCF program has been educational, adventurous, and amazing. From the yearly camps to the overflow of support from my sponsor and the organization. NRCF has been very instrumental in shaping the woman that I have become through the Life Skills training, educational support since the beginning of my O level (grade school) to the end of my A level (high school), and also the feeding program that helped my mind be at ease over when the next meal would come. I look forward to running my own business and sponsoring a child. Again I say thank you to the organization for the opportunity.

Warm regards,

Lorine

Emmanuel says… 

My experience at Ngong Road Children’s Foundation is one where I can use two words to describe it: “grateful and thankful”. I enrolled in the program in 2010 at age eleven years. My academic journey hasn’t been a smooth one. In fact, I could describe it as surfing through strong ocean waves, but NRCF was always there to help me surf the tides.

How the program has positively impacted my life

The program gave me a scholarship from primary school to university for my education. NRCF also provided Life Skills training and other support programs. I am currently interning as an ICT intern in the program as a TechMate. This internship has greatly empowered me economically and upscaled my technical skills on matters concerning information technology.

What does my future look like? 

I could describe my future from the lenses of an optimist. One that is promising and demanding as well. I view myself growing even better. This could be by adding more academic qualifications to my portfolio and having reliable years of experience in the business information, technology arena. Demanding in the aspect that all the achievements I want to make will require me to push myself beyond ordinary limits. I do believe that this far I have proven that I am capable of being and doing better and the rate at which I am growing is intensifying rather than slowing.

Thank you all,

Emmanuel

By Leave a Comment

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

By Leave a Comment

The Saturday Program

Each Saturday we host a child development program with the help of our Case Managers. The program consists of fun activities surrounding a wholesome fresh lunch prepared and served by our cooks. A nurse is on hand to distribute multivitamins and deworming pills regularly and meets with individual children who are ill, referring them to clinics or prescribing treatment as appropriate. The nurse also gives health talks to different age groups. The Saturday Program Coordinator organizes activities geared towards cognitive development, and social and physical development. We invite volunteers to support running the activities as well as bring in new ideas. The activities rotate between the following themes;

  • Cognitive activities include book reading and puzzle games
  • Olympic athletics which is all about running (which Kenyans are famous for)
  • Clubs and talent search including drama, music, and Taekwondo
  • Ball games such as soccer and Katie (dodgeball)
  • Crazy Olympics. This includes crazy games such as banana foot pass relay, balloon relay, three-legged relay, and sack relay.

In 2020, we put the Saturday Program on hold due to  COVID-19. This dealt a big blow to our students as the Saturday Program is a good opportunity for kids to build memories, friendship, sportsmanship, and enjoy a “sumptuous” meal together. We resumed the program in May of 2021 but, despite all the hype, the attendance was very low as most parents and guardians were very cautious of releasing their children due to COVID-19 fears. It was equally challenging for the program coordinators to try to organize activities with less contact and ensure kids observed the Ministry of Health guidelines such as wearing masks. However, as time passed more students have attended the program and in this last quarter of the year, we have reached over 90% attendance. During the holiday break, we also had a very high attendance of high school students which means we will need a bigger and better field next year. 

The August Camp was also canceled due to Covid-19 and with the change of the school calendar, the Saturday Program has now become the new “mini-camp”. The Saturday Program has defined the true meaning of the NRCF family as the staff and students come together to share joy and happiness with each other and forget about the hustle and bustle of the slums and city. It is also during the Saturday Program that the Case Managers get to do further follow-up on the child’s wellbeing.