On Saturday, May 7th, Brian and I spent the morning at the Starehe Girls' School on the outskirts of Nairobi. Surrounded by coffee fields and forest, the school sits on 55 acres of donated land and, since 2005, has been educating high school girls. All of the girls (almost 400 are enrolled at the school this year) are on scholarships and come from poor families. The girls' school was started as a partner school to the Starehe Boys' School (which we've also partnered with), which, for 50 years, has been offering excellent education to underprivileged boys. There were so many impressive things we saw at the Starehe Girls' School: polite, hard-working students; immaculate classrooms and dorms; beautiful grounds; innovative and hands-on learning projects such as a small farm with gardens and cows (the manure produced by the 14 cows at the farm is mixed with water and fermented to produce biogas that fuels one of the stoves in the school's kitchen and the cows are milked every day to provide fresh milk for meals). What a beautiful school and a beautiful vision for education. I can't wait to get some of my Global Issues Network students out to see this school, particularly because some of them ran a workshop about the value of educating girls in developing nations at the recent GISS conference. (See www.girleffect.org for more information about this, and about how the Starehe Girls' School is such an important investment in Kenya's future.)
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