Rising Up Against the Odds in Africa’s Largest Slum

A Shining Hope: Kibera’s School for Girls

Award-Winning **VIDEO**

Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel

“I have a dream, a dream that will never fail.

Every mighty king was once a crying baby.  Every great tree was once a tiny seed.  And so is my dream.

This journey seems so long.  Yet I will not waiver.  The path has stones all over, but I will not give up. 

Every day of my life is a page of my history.  Every step I take is a move to my glorious destiny.

It’s not where I am, but where I’m going that matters.  So dream!”

~Eunice Akoth

Located just three miles from the center of downtown Nairobi and home to an estimated 1 million people living in an area the size of NYC’s Central Park, Kibera is Africa’s largest slum.

The Kenyan government, which owns the land where Kibera stands, refuses to formally recognize the settlement.  It regards its residents as squatters who simply don’t belong there even though they have nowhere else to go.

As such, the government turns a blind eye to its conditions and plight.  The people of Kibera’s 12 villages are conveniently denied basic social services such as education, healthcare, sanitation, clean water, electricity, and roads– and the basic human dignity that accompanies them.

A Girl’s Life is the story of Eunice Akoth, a fourth grade student at the Kibera School for Girls.  She has a passion for poetry, an aptitude for math, and a love of the book Matilda by Roald Dahl.

She has lived all her life in Kibera.  Although she is only ten years old, she has dreams of traveling the world from New York to Melbourne, before returning to Kenya and becoming a doctor.

Though Eunice is considered a bright student by her teachers and fortunate enough to receive a free education in a place where only 8% of the girls have a chance to attend school, she also represents the far-too-common case of a girl who must overcome extreme obstacles in order to find her way out of poverty.

Unfortunately, according to Nairobi’s Kibera Law Centre, the statistics are not in favor of Eunice succeeding.  Or any of the kids there for that matter.  The odds are stacked against them.

Kibera’s 1 million people are jammed into makeshift tin huts in a 1.5 square mile area; with an average of 8 people per hut and without toilets, human waste and garbage run rampant through the rambling walking paths of the slum village.  There are no streets, street lighting, police or medical facilities.  Nor is there clean water, for that matter.  The people must purchase water from private vendors, paying up to 15 times more than non-slum residents.  The area has consequently become a de facto breeding ground for typhus, diphtheria, and malaria, depending on how poor and how low to the ground you live.  In Kibera, everyone lives on the same level, sharing the same conditions.

One of the most densely populated places on the planet, Kibera’s life expectancy is 30 years of age—compared to 50 years in the remainder of Kenya and 62 years on average throughout the rest of the world.  Half of all Kiberians are under the age of 15, and only four out of its five children will live to see their 5th birthday.  Children widely sniff glue-like hallucinogenic solvents to reduce their hunger pangs.  Solvent is cheaper than food and makes you forget your misery.

Violence is also no stranger in Kibera.  Women are routinely beaten, raped, or sold into prostitution, and both men and women are denied any form of police protection.  Shockingly enough, 66% of girls in Kibera routinely trade sex for food by the age of 16; many begin as young as 6. 

43% of Kibera’s young women reported their first sexual contact was a forced encounter, under duress or trauma.  The young girls also suffer an HIV rate that’s 5 times greater than that of their male counterparts.  Condoms and birth control are unheard of.

So where does all this lead for someone like young Eunice?

It’s well known that giving an education to a girl like Eunice– in an urban slum like Kibera– means she will earn more money on the whole, will invest 90% of those earnings in her family, be three times less likely to contract HIV, and have fewer, healthier children who are more likely to see adulthood.

The life-threatening obstacles can be boiled down to these three basic beginning points:  poverty, a lack of education, and gender inequality.  The lack of access to quality healthcare and resources often prevents girls like Eunice from staying in school, and the lack of value placed on women and girls means many of the most vulnerable girls in Kibera will never start school at all.

But there is a small glimmer of hope, of change.  It starts, simply, with creating a school for girls.  Kibera’s young women can be a model for others if given the opportunity.  With some luck and investment, they could transition from urban poverty to urban change.  They could become tomorrow’s progressive leaders.

Sponsoring the two videos seen above and below, the Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO) organization believes change– for Eunice and others like her in Kibera– needs to be centered on creating schools with superior education, free healthcare, food, and
psychosocial services that they can attend. 

And so they did just that:  The Kibera School for Girls was founded in 2009, the slum’s first free primary and middle school for girls like Eunice.

The Kibera School for Girls mission is about education, transforming lives and creating opportunity, fostering hope and empowerment, and making a difference for the most vulnerable.  With nearly 400 successful students well on their way, Shining Hope has expanded their goal by opening another new school for girls in nearby Malthare, another large and impovershed slum.

“Stop watching all your dreams going down the drain,” Eunice wisely says to others, rising above her tender age of 11 years.

“Fight.  Fight fearlessly!” she advises.  “Fight like a lion even if you are wounded– and change.  It’s not about who you are, but how you see yourself.  It’s about where you are going.  If you trust in yourself, you can make it.”

“So dream!”