Ngong Road Children's Foundation

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

Maisy Story

Maisy Njeri joined the NRCF program in 2014 when she was in Grade 5. She was raised by her mother having lost her father at a tender age. Later after her mother and her other siblings moved to the village due to the high cost of living, Maisy moved in with her grandmother who resides in one of the slums in Dagoretti so that she could continue getting education support from the Ngong Road Children’s Foundation (NRCF).

Maisy worked hard in school through the support accorded to her by NRCF and finished her primary and secondary education. She later pursued a diploma in beauty therapy which has been her passion since her childhood and graduated in 2022.  

Maisy Njeri currently works in one of the best spas in Nairobi as a consultant beautician. She is able to comfortably support her mother and siblings. Her life and that of her family have been transformed through the support from her sponsor and the friends of Ngong Road in general. 

She is grateful to NRCF and more so her sponsor in the USA for believing in her and giving her the gift of education enabling her to better her life and that of her family. 

Transform a life today.

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.

2023 Alumni Camp

The Alumni Camp was held from Friday, 20th January 2023 To Sunday, 22nd January 2023 at the Duara Flamingo Camp, located in Elementaita, Nakuru (Lake Elementaita Lodge). The camp was intended to celebrate the accomplishments of the 2022 post-secondary graduates and welcome them to the alumni association as well as have their first Job preparedness training.

We had a total of 36 campers that included 31 alumni, 3 staff members and 2 facilitators from the organization. The alumni slept in tents and their meals were prepared by the hotel chefs We had a number of activities and training that were meant to develop their employability skills as well as their emotional intelligence. There was a training session that was conducted by Be The Leader (BTL) on job interview skills, digital marketing, entrepreneurship skills and career development. The objective of the training was to teach them how to be outstanding during an interview, how to make them visible to employers via social media and the basics of starting a business.

There were also lots of team competition activities like crazy games and Olympics. The alumni also got a chance to visit the Kariandusi prehistoric site and African Diatomite Industries Ltd to learn about the mining of diatomite (from skeletons of very tiny animals called diatoms) and its uses.

The camp was a success and we hope that the alumni got impacted positively from all the training and activities. We hope that they use the skills gained to better equip themselves for the employment and self-employment sectors.