MCK Embakasi Nursery School
Minister Rev Benjamin Mati
Head teacher Julia Murungi
Embakasi, east of Nairobi, has a growing middle-class area, but there is also a very poor area close to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the railway and an industrial area where casual work is available intermittently for the unskilled labourers living in the nearby shanty slum. This is where most of the sponsored children in the Nursery and State Primary School live.
The small Methodist Church at Embakasi had been trying to provide nursery education to children in the area, but for many families in casual low-paid work it isn’t possible to pay even the very low fees being charged, and the nursery was on the verge of closing when Karibuni was approached.
Karibuni Trust is fully supporting 18 of the poorest children in the nursery, by providing food, uniforms and nursery fees and there are 68 fee-paying children there. The staff includes teachers, cooks and a caretaker/messenger.
The church has now started its own private Primary School with around 50 fee-paying children, but Karibuni Trust is not involved with this in any way, and the children we support in Primary School attend the local Government schools.
The church site is large, and the local members started with a tin hut to provide two classrooms – nursery and pre-unit, a separate hut for the kitchen, and used the tin church for some activities. The nursery children all have millet tea or porridge in the mornings and a cooked meal at lunchtime, when the sponsored Primary School children join them.
Karibuni Trust also pays 75% of the cost of uniforms for 12 Standard 1 children and 50% for 56 children in Standards 2 – 8, and feeds all the children. The teachers are excellent and maintain a high standard of care and nursery education for the children, with basic facilities. They work hard to improvise teaching aids and spend time with the children at break times as well as in the classrooms.
In 2010 a new Management Committee was formed. The church members have been very involved with and supportive of the local community, with the church trying to pay the balance of the costs of Primary School uniforms. There is neither a Saturday nor a holiday programme but Karibuni Trust made a small grant to start an income generating programme with the carers. The number of children we are supporting in nursery is being reduced by taking only 6 new children each year because of the increasing number of Primary children year on year and the ongoing cost of supporting them beyond primary education.
Most of the costs of providing the project with access to mains water, mains drainage and electricity, the toilet blocks with hand washing facilities were covered by Karibuni Trust and we also gave a loan to build a new kitchen. A play area with swings, climbing frame and slide has been erected with gifts from children in JMA (Junior Missions for All) in the Methodist Church in UK.
