Gilgil Highway Primary School is in is the town of Gilgil in Kenya’s Nakuru county.
The government opened the school in 2012. Every day, 1208 students come for classes, which run from pre-school/nursery (ECD) to grade eight. They have 15 teachers and five support staff.
Two big advantages at the school are electricity and piped water. When supplies are available, they run a school lunch program, which is an enormous boost to the children’s health and school performance.
The challenges they face
Gilgil is a low-income town with many informal housing settlements. The families there try to support their families with market stalls, daily wage work, motorcycle taxi driving and similar jobs. The living conditions are poor. As students get older, they are vulnerable to dropping out so that they can find jobs and help their families. Street-involved parents cannot care for their children, leading to a large number of abandoned children.
What’s the Chalice connection?
Chalice has run our sponsorship program in Gilgil since 2011, through our Saidia sponsor site. We sponsor children living in the Saidia Children’s Home (orphanage) and children who live with their families.
Chalice supports Gilgil Highway’s school farm through our African School Farms and Food Security Project. The staff love that their vegetable garden enhances their school meals. Chalice nutrition programs supports their school lunches, as well.
Gilgil Highway’s big challenge:
The staff at the school don’t have enough resources for all their 1200+ students. Their kitchen is under-equipped to keep up with the demand for lunches. The students don’t have proper dishes or utensils to eat with, or enough water stations to wash their hands and plates properly.
In the classrooms, eight rooms need major repairs. These buildings have problems with damaged or unfinished floors, leaky roofs, and lack of proper windows and doors. All these shortcomings make the rooms cold, damp, dusty and uncomfortable. Not ideal learning conditions!
The students also must share desks and textbooks. Four or five children sharing a desk and a book makes it very challenging to focus and absorb the lesson.
Lastly, most female students cannot afford sanitary towels. Often, they stay home from school during menstruation, which means they miss a week of school per month.
How you can help
By becoming Gilgil Highway’s sister school, you can help them with:
