Your Gift Becomes Their Story

When Faith joined our STEM Engagement program at fourteen, she'd never typed on a keyboard. Her secondary school in Kitui had one shared computer for over three hundred students, and it rarely worked.

Every Saturday for a year, she walked forty minutes to our learning center to sit through basic computing, then HTML, then her first lines of JavaScript. Her mentor remembers the week she stopped asking "how do I do this" and started asking "what if I tried this instead."

Today, Faith has built a website for her church's youth group and is one of six girls from her cohort now mentoring the newest STEM Saturday intake — the same program that started her journey.

David's father drives a boda boda and his mother sells vegetables at the local market. Between them, they could cover most terms — but not all of them. In Form 2, David nearly dropped out when the family fell short by a few thousand shillings.

Our Academic Training program covered the gap that term, and again in Form 3 when a family emergency ate into the household's savings. Beyond the fees, David joined our weekly study circles, where volunteer tutors helped him catch up in mathematics — a subject he'd almost given up on entirely.

This year, David sat his final exams and graduated — the first in his family to finish secondary school. He's now applying for a technical college diploma in electrical installation.

Their mother made an impossible choice every January: which twin gets to enroll this year, and which one waits. It had been that way since primary school — one brother always a grade behind the other, neither of them ever quite catching up.

When our outreach team visited their village for a community health and education day, a caseworker learned their story and connected the family to a sponsorship covering both boys' fees for the full year.

For the first time, Peter and Paul are in the same grade, in the same classroom, doing homework together at the same kitchen table every evening. Their mother says the house has never been this loud — or this happy.

Brian was labeled a "difficult" student for most of primary school. He asked too many questions, his teachers said, and disrupted the lesson. Nobody had time to sit with a ten-year-old and actually answer "why does electricity move through wire but not through wood?"

His mentor in our Talent Development program did. Over six months of weekend sessions, that one question turned into a shared project: a simple working circuit built from scrap wire and a torch bulb, then a small motor, then a fan.

Brian now spends his evenings sketching new projects in a notebook his mentor gave him. His teachers still say he asks a lot of questions. Now they write his name down for the school science fair instead.