Ngong Road Children's Foundation

We empower Nairobi children living in poverty to transform their lives through education and support, leading to employment.

TechMates Update

By Sallyanne Atieno

Since the launch of the TechMates program back in 2021, we have had over 15 beneficiaries benefit from the program. As of January 2023, over 6 TechMates had completed their learning internships and transitioned to project based contracts while two were on internship. The project based TechMates successfully completed their six months internship and gained the necessary skills needed to secure contract works for Ngong Road Children Foundation (NRCF), Friends of Ngong Road (FoNR), Karibu Loo Limited (KLL) and other external clients. One of the external clients, Lido Nation, has so far recruited over 3 digital marketers from the program to assist with Websites translation and management and act as community outreach officers to create awareness of the cardano eco system locally in Kenya. 

As of February 2023, one more intern joined the program under the developer path and we are working on recruiting 4 more alumni this month. So far, we have over 8 TechMates on the Project based contract working for NRCF and KLL. In total we have about 12 trained TechMates and 2 that dropped out. Out of the activeTechMates we have, half of them have an external job with Lido Nation. They polish the Lido Nation website as well as creating new features. Two of the TechMates who are in the digital marketing path have also been able to secure other clients. One of them, Tabitha, is currently working for Vobyl tea as an administrative and marketing person. She is responsible for communicating with customers, packaging, as well as carrying out deliveries among other roles. The other TechMate, Sallyanne, has started working for DirectEd as a consultant/ project freelancer. She is responsible for leading marketing campaigns for DirectEd on twitter, coming up with NFT- based fundraising strategies among other roles. These two are also the ones leading blockchain operations at the Ngong Road Blockchain Lab. 

The techmates have goals that they have set for themselves for this year. Some of the goals include becoming more profound in software development, securing more clients, taking additional online courses, applying for masters scholarship, taking software engineering scholarship courses at alx and many more aspirations. We received computer donations from the Safaricom foundation which will be very useful as we plan on supporting over 15 new beneficiaries this year. The current TechMates are already making use of them and we are extremely grateful to Safaricom for this donation that will enable our students to transform their lives. We believe that we are already making progress with the program and we are looking to continue restructuring the program as per the market and clients needs. We are now even more inclined to add more employment programs to see our students and alumni succeed and transform their lives. 

The Elephant Girl Book Club

By Sallyanne Atieno

Appreciating our cultural diversity! What a way to kick-start NRCF book club 2023. The objective is to cultivate a reading culture among the young boys and girls. The first book is “The Elephant Girl” a story of Jama – a young Maasai girl who befriended a Baby elephant.)

The Book club was launched on Saturday 28th, January 2023. A second session was on held Monday 30th. Going forward sessions will be held on Saturdays and weekday during school breaks.
Growing up as a young Masaai Indigenous girl, Tunda (Primary department Senior Case Manager) shared her story with the girls. Listening to her story the girls were very fascinated by her childhood, growing up in the countryside, and were ready to learn more from the book.

We started with only three girls and since we only had one copy of the book. We are applying the read-aloud and around method for the sessions. This way everyone gets to read two chapters before the other.
Since all the girls were born in the city and none of them is Maasai, Tunda thought of sharing a little bit of her culture with them during the second session. She thus adorn them with the Maasai regalia for the session, and then they took pictures at the end of the session. It was an exciting experience for the young girls. They got a feeling of how Jama described her appearance during the community ceremony/occasion she attended with her mother and her Kokoo (Grandmother).

The pioneer girls are:- Dorcas Atieno (from the Luo community) Esther Chebet (from the Kalenjin community and Getrude Ndunge (from the Kamba community) This was also as a way to help us appreciate the beauty found in our cultural diversity. One of the photos is a picture of me showing them a photo of a “sandgrouse” as one of the girls asked what type of animal it was.

Four more girls and five boys have expressed an interest to join the book club thus will be exploring how to incorporate them going forward.

The successful journey of Roseann

By Sallyanne Atieno

Roseann joined Ngong Road Children’s Foundation (NRCF) in 2007 as one of the beneficiaries for the education program from primary school through Secondary School to University. Her education journey was made successful through the financial support of her sponsor, Steve Lewis.

Roseann graduated from GSU Primary School with an above-average grade point average. This gained her a place at a Nairobi girls’ high school. She earned an extraordinary performance and a university admission grade, and she enrolled at Maseno University to study Geospatial Information Science with IT, a field that ladies have traditionally shunned.

She was relieved to have completed her four-year program.

Roseann has held several leadership positions in her education journey beginning as a squad leader at Ngong Road Children’s Foundation, a Deputy School Captain, football Captain and Captain of students Campaign Against Drugs  at her high school. In Maseno University, she was a class representative.

She began her career at Kenya National Highways Authority, KeNHA, and later joined Digireg Kenya as a data operator in Kisumu County where she currently works. In her spare time, Roseann volunteers as an Environmental Champion and participates in  the UN-HABITAT- COVID-19 mitigation activities. Roseann also organizes a charity program at St Mary Magdalene Oasis of Peace Children’s Home in Kisumu County and a Street feeding program for street Children.

We wish Roseann a successful career journey.

First Class Honors

This year has been incredible for us in terms of getting exceptional performances from our students and Sallyanne is one of those students who has made us extremely proud. Sallyanne has become the first student ever since the organization started to get first-class honors! This is the highest achievement ever made by a post-secondary student.

Sallyanne joined Kabarak University in May 2018 and was admitted to the Bachelor of Mass Communication. She was doing exceptionally well in her studies as could be seen from her end-of-semester results. In September of 2021, she was attached to a local radio station where she worked for three months and December marked the end of her studies. 

In January 2022, Sallyanne was among the first students to join the TechMates program where she specialized in Digital Marketing. She has since been creating content for both the NRCF and FoNR websites as well as managing the content on both social media pages and she helps in training new Digital Marketing TechMates who join the program. It is from the program that she got an opportunity to work with Lido Nation which is a Cardano staking pool. She works for Lido Nation as a content writer, a website translator, a social media manager and she is also a trainer for mentees who would like to learn more about Blockchain. The greatest highlight of working for Lido Nation was when she became a co-proposer in a proposal that got funded.

Sallyanne graduated on the 16th of December 2022 making her a journalist by profession. She received an award during the annual AGM as the first student to get first-class honors. Her role model is Larry Madowo and she hopes to become an equally great journalist. She has set the pace for our post-secondary students and we hope that many will follow suit. Congratulations Sallyanne!