Nairobi, Kenya - The last time I visited Heshima Kenya, I wrote a blog in which I described this then prospective grantee partner in detail. I was clearly impressed by the organization’s work and programs. It’s been two years since that visit, and two years since we began supporting Heshima Kenya. And to this day, I continue to be impressed by its unique positioning as the only organization serving unaccompanied adolescent girls—refugee minors—through education, counseling, and livelihood programming.

Two years ago, I was driven to the hustle and bustle of Eastleigh, a refugee community near Nairobi that is home to a large number of Somalis, as well as Ethiopians and other urban refugees. At that time, Heshima was working with 45 girls (and the child of one of the girls) and had a small staff of about five people. As a start-up, the organization was still seeking institutional funding and relying primarily on individual donations. Yesterday, I had the privilege of visiting Heshima’s new center, located in Riverside, a peaceful and quite neighborhood that is a far cry from where the organization was when I visited last. Read more

Kibera, Kenya - On Saturday afternoon, I visited Carolina for Kibera (CFK), a GFC grantee partner that works in East Africa’s largest slum, Kibera, which is located on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. The Global Fund for Children has supported CFK’s Binti Pamoja program, which works with adolescent girls, since 2006. I arranged my meeting for Saturday so that I could have an opportunity to meet and talk with the girls who are part of the Binti Pamoja program.

I arrived a bit early and found myself wandering around the CFK offices, where a number of meetings and activities were taking place. Shortly after I entered the CFK gates, I was greeted warmly by a young woman, and I told her I was hoping to see Carolina Sakwa, the Binti Pamoja program coordinator. She returned some five minutes later and told me she would walk me down to where the Binti Pamoja program is located. On our way to the center, she and I introduced ourselves and began talking about the program. Read more

Nairobi, Kenya - The Global Fund for Children, as part of its membership in the Grassroots Girls Initiative, is currently conducting a case study on its grantee partner Center for Domestic Training and Development (CDTD), based in Nairobi, Kenya. The case study is intended to highlight the critical role that grassroots organizations play in reaching, serving, and empowering vulnerable adolescent girls.

CDTD promotes the rights and protection of domestic workers by professionalizing the industry through a formal training curriculum; working with employers to provide worker rights and human rights training; and working with communities to identify children engaged in domestic work to ensure that they are removed from the field. A small organization driven by the passion, ambition, and determination of its founder, Edith Murongo, CDTD has accomplished significant feats in its few years of life, including having trained hundreds of young women and having obtained the government’s accreditation for its East African household management training institute. Read more

GFC Donates Books to Homeless Children across America

Washington, DC - I’m not ashamed to admit it—at my first sleepover as a little kid, I got scared and my mom had to pick me up in the middle of the night. In a strange new house, without my bedtime routine, I just couldn’t seem to fall asleep. After that scary night, I learned that I could bring my blanket when I slept at my friend’s house, and that it was all right if I asked his parents for a bedtime story. These familiar comforts helped me get over the new and scary shadows in my best friend’s bedroom, and the weird silence in his neighborhood. Thankfully, I had a stable home growing up, so scary nights in a new house were unusual. But for the 1 in 50 American children who are homeless, a scary night in a strange new place is their bedtime routine.

There are more homeless children in America today than at any other time since the Great Depression. Homeless families generally do not live on the streets, as their children will then be removed by child protective services, but instead move from shelters to cars to cheap hotels to crashing with family and neighbors. Sometimes families even split up in order to fit into shelters. This constant movement and instability inflicts lasting trauma on young children. Homeless children are twice as likely to repeat a grade, and their average high school graduation rate is below 25 percent. Read more

Washington, DC - Soccer is a national obsession in Brazil. Unfortunately, not every kid is able to participate. As Brazil’s internationally unparalleled team plays at the World Cup, now is a good opportunity to look deeper into what soccer actually means for kids in this country.

Children can be found all over Brazil playing soccer, barefoot, on homemade fields. But low-income youth often do not get coaches or organized teams. Their public schools do not offer varsity teams or even PE classes, and they cannot afford access to playing fields at expensive universities and private clubs.

Many of these low-income youth live on less than a dollar a day, in shantytowns on the edges of cities and start working before they even complete elementary school. These young people are left out of more than just soccer—they are denied access to much of the economy and to full participation in society. Read more