Mission

To help impoverished Kenyan kids find happiness and success.

Vision

Kenya is an East-African country with a steadily growing economy. However, 20% of the Kenyan population lives below the poverty line of 1.25 USD per day and 40% survives with less than 2 USD per day. This part of the population depends on public facilities, like public schools and hospitals – in contrary to the middle class which is increasingly able to use private institutions.

Unfortunately, the quality of public institutions and services is often below standard. As a result, 16% of the children are not making use of primary education and more than half of the children never enroll in secondary school. The latter is mainly caused by the fact that many primary school pupils underperform. They attain marks of below 250 in their final exams, which is the reason they are not admitted to any high school. Research shows that most teachers and principals mention overcrowded classes and inadequate facilities as a direct cause for the poor performances.

“Large classes blamed for poor KCPE results”.  (The Standard, Kenya’s second biggest newspaper)

Apart from that, a large part of the population does not receive adequate health care. Most of the clinics in rural areas lack the necessary equipment. Because often drugs and doctors are unavailable, many patients are not able to receive proper treatment.

Kibet4Kids aims to help impoverished Kenyan children by applying the following measures:

• Building public primary schools in areas with lack of schools, so that more children will be able to receive primary education.

• Building extra classrooms for existing schools, so that the number of pupils per classroom will be reduced.

• Improving facilities in existing schools, in order to enhance the performances of the pupils, such as delivering desks, computers and other stationary, renovating classrooms, building a library, building better latrines and employing extra teachers. The goal is to create a pleasant, stimulating and conducive learning environment, so that pupils perform better and a higher percentage will be admitted to high school.

• Sponsoring students who do well in primary school and are admitted to high school, but are not able to pay for their school fees.

• Improving existing public medical facilities in rural areas, so that more people will be able to use specialized health care and more children can be treated for mild disorders, like diarrhea.

Those are our mission and vision. Below you can read about our core principles:

Our 10 core principles:

 1. Impoverished Kenyan children; We want to improve the lives of impoverished Kenyan children.

2. Free public services; We do that by improving the free public services.

3. Public education; More than anything we believe in improving public education. When this is of bad quality, children have a much smaller chance to become happy and successful in life. When education is good, even kids from poor families have a chance to make it in life.

4. Visiting By visiting villages, schools and hospitals ourselves, we can decide where our help is most needed.

5. Together with the community; As soon as we make our choice, we start to work together with the community of the area where we will help. The community is an essential part of each project and will be asked to participate in planning and executing of the project, as well as taking charge of the follow-up. We expect the community to think ánd work with us.

6. Close look;  Despite that, we always keep a close look on each project that we do. We are able to do this, because our chairperson and our secretary live in Kenya.

7. Complex of interventions; A project can never be a simple and unilateral intervention; it’s always a complex of interventions. For instance, in improving education we think about building classrooms and delivering study materials, as well as offering additional classes to the teachers (to upgrade their knowledge), getting a daily lunch for the pupils and bringing electricity to the school. This does not only serve the complex reality, it also gives the best results.

8. To measure is to know; we want to know whether our method works so therefor we measure. For instance, we look at the study results of the pupils, to see whether they improve, or we look at the number of patients of a clinic that was treated successfully. This will be repeated each year.

9. Stay in contact; Even when a project is finished, we still stay in contact. We want our help to have a long-lasting effect, so therefore we like to stay up-dated and if necessary we will make (small) corrections.

10. 99%; We use as much money as possible for real help. Up to now we used 99% of our budget for real help in Kenya. Our directors are not paid anything, not even for travel expenses. Our website and our flyers were made free of charge. The costs for starting the foundation were paid by our chairperson.

In the coming years, the focus will be on education. That’s also why we describe our activities in the field of education in more detail. Improving medical facilities will be a goal for us in the future, starting from 2016/2017. By then we will give more details about our medical projects on this website.