Blog Post
Ensuring the Right to Education with Safe Dorm for Girls in Kenya
News: September 15, 2015
Blue Chip Foundation Partners with White Feather Foundation
Los Angeles—The Blue Chip Foundation, along with the White Feather Foundation, is proud to announce the completion of a girls’ dormitory designed to provide safe haven for girls attending the Uranga Secondary School in Sauri, Kenya.
The founders of each organization— Jennifer Stengaard Gross of the Blue Chip Foundation and Julian Lennon of the White Feather Foundation—first visited the school in February 2014 to assess the girls’ needs and find ways to contribute to the children’s educational aspirations. Gross and Lennon spoke with several scholarship students to determine where their help could be most beneficial when they learned that several of them had to walk up to 10 kilometers round-trip each day.
“The school was benefiting from working with Connect to Learn, a partnership of the Earth Institute of Columbia University , Ericsson, and Millennium Promise,” says Gross. “That organization’s mission is to address the lack of access to quality education in marginalized populations, and they’re having great success in academics. However, the challenge was getting the girls to and from the school safely so they could access the rigorous academic programs offered there.”
Several girls reported being mugged and assaulted during their commute to school, and expressed a desire for a dormitory where they could stay safe and focus on their education.
