One Dollar Back To School

Author:Wycliffe Barasa

Read time:2 minutes

What can 100sh ($1) can do

George Washington Carver once said, “education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.” Freedom. Freedom from what exactly? Freedom to do what? As it turns out, freedom means a number of things to different people. To some, advancing one's education secures an opportunity to study abroad and, thefeore, they are free to travel. To others, pursuing education means they will have a chance to enroll in far away high schools and colleges, away from the watchful gazes of their parents, away from the curfews and constraints, away from the thick, well-chiseled stick that frequently visited their backsides… And then there are those whose lives literally depend on education - education is their lifeline. Without it, they are stuck in a suffocating cycle of poverty, drowning in financial and opportunity lack that are consequently introduced to their children and their children.

According to a 2023 UNESCO report, 250 million children globally were not in school. This was a drastic surge from 6 million, a statistic recorded in 2021 of children who were out of school. A closer look at home revealed that 46 million children from Eastern and Southern Africa were out of school in 2023 according to UNICEF. Now in Kenya, a 2020 UNICEF report stated that 1.13 million children aged 6 to 13 were out of school. A 2024 report revealed that the percentage of out-of-school children aged 6 to 15 in Kenya had surged from 7.5% to 8.5%. All these statistics are daunting. They mean that across the world, continent and country, millions of school aged children are not in school. Most of these children are not in school because they have no financial resources to pay school fees. Some are roaming the streets in tattered clothes and disheveled appearances, banking on kind strangers for a meal. Some are in farms, quarries, markets, sweatshops, working for peanuts, peanuts to feed their loved ones. Some have turned to a life of crime, living in constant fear of death and authorities. A plethora of children have ceased to be children, their circumstances forcing them to become adults at tender ages. These children are caged by poverty and lack, their child-like wonder a transparent smoke set ablaze by lack of resources to keep them in school.

Now the good things is that there exists a multitude of people across the world, the content and nation, who can help these children attain their golden freedom. This year, we visited a school where half of the student population was not in school yet it was during an exam period. Want to know why these kids were not in class staring at the ceiling and sucking the edges of their pencils as they compose responses to exam questions? They had not paid sh100 which was their examination fee. Their school fees for a year? An average of sh1500. A pretty doable figure, yes? Yet, yet there ae millions of school-aged children in the country, in our rural areas, that are not in school. Some have not even seen the inside of a classroom this entire year.

At Kosi Africa, we want to give all children across Africa freedom. Freedom to carve a career path. Freedom to compete in the job market. Freedom to escape a cycle of hunger, lack, poverty. Freedom to change their narrative.

One of the ways we are doing this is through the One-Dollar-Back-To-School Initiative. This all-year-round campaign is meant to raise funds to keep our children in school. You’d be surprised how much a single sh100 can do for a child in different parts of Kenya, how your sh100 can help them open that golden door of freedom that is education.

Want to contribute to this campaign? Visit our page https://kosiafrica.org/one-dollar-back-to-school-campaign

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