Education for Girls in Tharaka, Kenya

World Centric + Women's Global Education Project

$103,301 from profits from fiscal year 2021

This project supports these U.N. Sustainable Development goals

Less than 15% of adolescent girls in rural Tharaka-Nithi county, Kenya, complete high school. These girls face many barriers to attending school, contributing to cyclical poverty and the under-development of entire communities. When girls are educated, their families are healthier, they have fewer children, they wed later, and they have more opportunities to generate income.

Women’s Global Education Project’s Sisters to School program works to dismantle the structural barriers keeping girls from attending and succeeding in school. They provide school scholarships to girls at risk of dropping out and provide mentoring & health education workshops. They also host community outreach and mobilization activities to better educate parents, boys, and community members on the importance of girls’ education. This tiered approach is essential for increasing community support and shifting attitudes in favor of gender equality. 68% of WGEP scholars qualify for college or university, compared to Kenya’s 18.5% national average. Additionally, 99% of WGEP scholars stay in school each year, compared to regional retention rates of 59%.

World Centric's funding will provide:

• Secondary school scholarships for 188 girls. Including school fees, school supplies, food, toiletries, and exam fees.
• University scholarships for 48 girls. Including tuition, room and board.
• Tertiary scholarships for 15 girls.
• Computer training for 30 scholars.
• Vocational training for high school graduates.
• Digital literacy workshops over high school students' holiday breaks.
• After-school clubs for 834 primary school students (456 girls, 378 boys).
• Community outreach for 2,500 people, including meetings with scholars' parents, community leaders and local teachers.

What happens when you educate girls?

According to the World Bank, limited educational opportunities for girls and barriers to completing 12 years of education cost countries between $15 trillion and $30 trillion dollars in lost lifetime productivity and earnings.

• Each extra year of secondary school that a girl completes can increase her lifetime earnings by 15-25%.
• Household income increases as girls finish school and enter the workforce.
• Brookings Institute reports that for every additional year of schooling a girl receives on average, her country’s resilience to climate disasters can be expected to improve by 3.2 points on the ND-GAIN Index, which calculates a country’s vulnerability to climate change in relation to its resilience
• A March 2021 report by the Malala Fund indicates that if all girls could attend 12 years of school and obtain access to modern contraception, it could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 37-41% by the end of the century.

About Women's Global Education Project

A World Centric partner since 2020

Women’s Global Education Project (WGEP) is an internationally recognized, award winning approach to women's empowerment. Recognized as an innovative model of best practice in Girls' Education by the United Nations, WGEP leaves no stone unturned in the quest for universal education, gender equality and empowerment of women, the factors critical to a society’s development. WGEP works in partnership with two local community organizations to implement its Sisters to School Program: Femme Plus in Senegal and Tharaka Women’s Welfare Program (TWWP) in Kenya. Local partners on the ground guarantees that the program is community-led and focused. Together we formulate a partner-driven, highly contextualized, and comprehensive approach that takes into account local conditions (poverty, gender bias, early marriage, FGM/C) to ensure that the obstacles preventing girls from attending and succeeding in school are dismantled.