Kenya

ECG Partnership: Mama Beth’s Orphanage

Kijabe, Kenya is a city with a population around 22,000. Kijabe, is a Maasai word that means “Place of the Wind.” It stands on the edge of the Great Rift Valley at an elevation of 2200m and is located about 50 kilometers north-west of the capital city of Nairobi. Kijabe is quite poor and many of the children living there do not complete high school.
ECG has developed a partnership with Mama Beth’s Orphanage, which is located in Kijabe.

Mama Beth’s is a non-governmental, non-political and non-profit organization that provides fundamental support to children who truly need it and focuses on helping the orphaned, poor, abused, and abandoned street children in Kenya. For thirty-five years Mama Beth has been taking care of children who are without parents or whose families are unable to provide care.

There are around 75 children at Mama Beth’s that are in primary through secondary school age. She is aging and needs help so that her legacy carries on and becomes sustainable. Her daughter, Jane, has stepped up to help continue her mother’s legacy. ECG helps Mama Beth’s orphanage by providing scholarship funding so that children can attend the local school. These scholarships provide books, shoes, uniforms, and fees. Through ECG’s support, we hope all these children will have an opportunity to complete high school—an opportunity they would not have otherwise.

ECG sponsored the first college graduate from Mama Beth’s in 2015 who will attend the Kenyan Heritage Teacher’s College to become a teacher. He has made a commitment to return after graduation to Mama Beth’s to teach for two years.

In 2018, ECG began a project with Mama Beth’s to help empower local women and girls called the Mama Beth’s Sewing Co-op. The project was initiated with the goal of creating washable sanitary pads to help bolster the high school graduation rate amongst young women. Impoverished young women often can’t afford proper sanitary pads and, because of the stigmatization of menstruation in Kenya, young women without proper sanitary pads are forced to stay home during their menstruation period. These young women fall behind in their studies, their test scores drop, and they eventually drop out of school. The Sewing Co-op is hoping to become sustainable by making products to sell in addition to the sanitary pads. We are hoping to train the women who work at the Co-op in the CEPET model so they can bring products for sale, affordable sanitary pads, and knowledge into their communities.

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