Kakamega Orphan Project - Overview

Overview

The organization focuses primarily on a group of forty-eight orphans who live at the Kakamega Orphans Care Center. There, they receive caring adult supervision, three healthy meals a day, educational sponsorship guaranteed through high school, healthcare, and other basic needs. The children range from age eight to eighteen and include both boys and girls. However, the majority are younger girls, who are the most vulnerable group of orphans. All of these children already have sponsors in the USA or Canada, but a need for high school sponsors is growing as a disproportionate number of children move from primary school to high school. High school sponsorship, at $400 per year, costs double that of primary school sponsorship, which is the reason more sponsors are needed.

Along with the forty-eight residents who receive three meals a day, about fifty needy children in the neighborhood—mostly orphans—come to the Care Center's dining hall for a nutritious midday meal during the school week.

The fastest growing component of the project has been home based educational sponsorships. Because there are so many orphans in the Kakamega area, it is only possible to admit children from the most severe cases of need to the Care Center. Even then, it may only be possible to provide space at the Center for one out of four or five orphaned siblings. To try to fill the gap between those who are helped and those who are not, the neediest children for whom there is no space at the Care Center are offered home based sponsorships; usually, these children are staying with poor relatives or other guardians that have taken them in after their parents' passing. To date eighty children are sponsored in such a manner. An individual child is paired with an individual sponsor in the USA/Canada through Friends of Kakamega, and through this international friendship the child's school fees & supplies, mattress/blanket, a food budget, and other forms of very basic assistance are put together. The stipend is well supervised by volunteers in Kakamega, Kenya to ensure that sponsorship money is indeed spent on the child and his or her needs.

In late 2007 construction began on the new boys' dormitory, spurred by the Kenya governments insistence that boys and girls be housed in separate buildings.

The majority of funding for the Orphan Project comes from donors in the United States and Canada, through the Friends of Kakamega. However, local Kenyans of modest means also do their best to support the project. The final source of revenue has been through income-generating projects, including a farm, shop, and room/van rental to visitors.

Another outreach program of the Friends church organization, the African Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI) of the Friends Peace Teams, from time to time maintains a small office on the Care Center property.