Educating Girls in Kibera: A Story of Hope

My story of hopefulness is found in the Kibera slum in Nairobi. Abdul Kassim initially ran a football team of girls and he said he came back after one summer break and he had lost his entire striking force to teen pregnancy.

He realized that as much as he was trying to support the chances for girls in this environment, education was the only thing that was really going to address that. So he set up a very simple classroom and ran around asking anyone who had any kind of teaching experience or skills to come and work in the school for free, which they did.

When I first met him, he had around 25 girls in the school and didn't really have any great academic objectives. It was really just to try and keep the girls safe.

Abdul had himself grown up in the slum, but he was quite an affluent slum dweller in relative terms in that he was educated and worked for Kenya Telecom, so he had the resources to be able to leave the slum, but decided that he wanted to invest back into his community as much as he could.

The school now has over 200 students, and they are building their first boarding house.