Growing WISER: A Girls School that Pays for Itself in Muhuru Bay, Kenya

What will make WISER different from the thousands of new schools for girls across Africa? WISER will pay for itself. Small scale, on-campus enterprises will provide a new, innovative platform for girls to develop skills required for future economic success, while generating income to cover the school’s operating costs. WISER will offer training courses in agricultural and technology-based entrepreneurship that will empower young women with the skills needed to lead their own lives and become independent change agents within their families, schools and wider communities. In the course of the last few years, WISER has registered as a Kenyan NGO, raised over $800,000 in grassroots fundraising, purchased a 7 acre piece of land, and hired a contractor and team of 450 local Muhuru Bay workers to build the school facility from December 2008-June 2009. Specifically, WISER’s current projects include: 1. A new boarding school for girls that will pay for itself. 2. The WISER school will provide female teachers as role models, teacher training in new pedagogies, and full and inclusive scholarships to two thirds of the girls enrolled, with a strong focus on selecting AIDS orphans. 3. "What Really Helps Girls?" Research Model: WISER students will complete a four year research project on 24 local and international development projects focused on "helping girls" and "scaling their programs to rural Africa." This opportunity will attract international NGOs and their vital services to Muhuru Bay while empowering WISER girls to become active participants rather than passive recipients of development aid that has all too often crippled communities rather than build them up. 4. Community programs in gender, leadership, and HIV/AIDS education. These programs will operate during school holidays so that students who are orphans do not need to leave the school. This also prevents girls from becoming pregnant or forced into marriages while home over school breaks. 5. Installation of a pipeline and water treatment facility. Adolescent girls spend a significant amount of time collecting water from Lake Victoria. This activity also brings them into proximity with fishermen who involve girls in transactional sex. Lake Victoria also has a high level of schistosomes, making water collection a serious health risk. Walking to the lake and back to collect water can also take hours away from studying. WISER is installing a complete water system to provide clean, potable water for the school and surrounding three schools and community health centre with a catchment size of 22,150. 6. UNICEF-WASH and WISER Sanitation and Hygiene Program: WISER forged a relationship with UNICEF-WASH (Water, Sanitation and Health) to increase latrine coverage from an abysmal 10% to 80% by the end of 2009 with young women community leaders being trained as the community sanitation hygiene and health workers for the program. 7. Installation of a solar and wind powered community computer center. One wing of the WISER school will serve as a community resource center, providing computers and Internet access, computer training to post-secondary school women, and access to health information via the Internet. 16 lap top computers have been donated to WISER and a pilot program of 8 lap tops and four solar panels was installed in the summer of 2007. 8. Public-private partnership with the Muhuru Bay School district. WISER will serve 120 girls, greatly expanding the capacity for girls education in the area as the single current secondary school has the capacity for only 60 girls. (Usually only 40 are enrolled.) However, we believe all girls – and boys - deserve to be competitive for entry into secondary schools. To help all standard eight students in the area perform better on the national primary exit exam, the KCPE, we have created WISERBridge. WISERBridge works with the headmasters of all nine primary schools in the region to identify areas where targeted improvements in public school teacher training will generate significantly improved educational outcomes, making students more competitive for subsidized national schools. 9. Research to develop a multi-level HIV intervention program for youth. Funded by Johnson & Johnson and the Center for AIDS Research, this program goes beyond individual behavior change and instead examines the broader contextual factors that influence sexual decision making: the familial, social, cultural and spatial factors that can influence risk or resiliency. Year two of this research will pilot an intervention strategy to reduce the HIV risk of 9-15 year olds. 10. Provision of sanitary pads to keep girls in school. Girls are often driven out of school when they start menstruating and lack sanitary pads or private latrines. In Muhuru Bay girls who miss school and want to make up their work are not allowed to meet alone with a teacher to make up missed class work, as the risk of sexual predation is so high. The beginning of puberty often leads to increased academic failure. It has also been hypothesized that using inappropriate materials to contain menstrual blood (such as unclean rags, grass, etc) may increase the risk of HIV transmission. Though a partnership with Johnson & Johnson, WISER provides over 50,000 donated pads per year to girls in the last year of primary school. We are also working with community leaders to develop a microfinance program to expand the number of girls and women receiving pads. WISER's Current Awareness and Fundraising Projects Include: 1. 14 WISER Partner Schools across the United States, Canada and Switzlerand that have each committed to raising $1,000 per year for four years to establish a scholarship in their schools name for a girl at WISER. 2. United Nations Presentations: WISER has presented at the Youth Assembly at the United Nations in 2007 and 2008 about the importance of girls' education in the Millennium Development Goals. 3. WISER Online Presence: The WISER program keeps an up-to-date website that informs visitors of the need for increased girls' education through video, pictures and testimonies from girls in Muhuru Bay: Number of unique hits since day 1: 50,000. 4. WISER Grassroots Fundraising: Churches, businesses, families and friends have all made small donations (average size of 25 dollars) to contribute to the total $856,000 received to date through capital and in-kind donations. 5. Duke University Student Group: A group of 300 Duke students lead campus-wide awareness campaigns during a WISER Week in the Fall and the Spring to emphasize the importance of girls’ education in national and international development policy and practice. Number of students participating per year. Simply put, WISER starts from the premise that all girls deserve a life free from abuse and the need to sell their bodies to feed their minds.