Summer 2023 Gazeti: Educated Girls Educate Girls
The Summer 2023 Gazeti follows one story all the way around a circle: a Daraja graduate who went looking for the next Daraja girl, and found her selling donuts outside a school gate.
Bilha and Praise
Bilha graduated from Daraja in 2015, studied Literature and IT at Maseno University, and came back to work at Daraja as Special Programs Coordinator. “Before I came to Daraja, I wasn’t aware of many basic things about myself as a girl,” she writes. “The only thing I was sure about was that I wanted to change my story.”
Years later, near the gate where she lives, Bilha noticed a girl named Praise selling mandazis in the morning and chips after school to cover her family’s costs and her own school fees. When the Form Ones reported to school and Praise was still at her usual spot, Bilha printed a Daraja application and carried it to her home. She drove Praise to the interview herself and watched her be admitted on the spot.
Praise tells her side of it in the same issue: her father’s death, her mother leaving, being separated from her sister, and the morning her grandmother had to say there was no money for school. “He told me that I was one of the Daraja girls,” she writes about meeting co-founder Jason Doherty. “I cried and fell on my knees.”
Vision 2025 update
The issue also carries a progress report on Vision 2025, the plan to expand Daraja’s programs to reach 5,000 girls:
- A permanent home. 38.5 acres were donated for a new campus, with architectural drawings complete and groundbreaking that summer.
- More students. Daraja turns away 9 of every 10 girls who apply. That year the school admitted 52 girls, its largest class ever, and began the shift to a three-year secondary school alongside the rest of Kenya.
- W.I.S.H. beyond campus. The Women of Integrity, Strength and Hope curriculum reached more than 1,600 girls at 7 partner schools, plus 273 boys through “Man I Am,” a version of W.I.S.H. written for teenage boys.
