World Connect has been working in Kenya since 2011 in partnership with many dynamic, talented grassroots leaders and community-based organizations, as well as committed Peace Corps Volunteers placed in remote villages throughout the country.
Our projects have directed energy and resources towards a myriad of community-driven development priorities in Kenya, such as improving school environments by building science labs and computer labs, enhancing the quality of care for pregnant women and mothers by adding maternity wings to rural health clinics, drilling for water in drought-stricken villages, establishing women-led community demonstration gardens and greenhouses, among many others. Some of our signature projects, our most celebrated, discussed, and shared successes, have taken place in Kenya, including:
Advancing Girl Power with Wind Power
No Sex for Fish: Nyamware Beach
Interested in a video featuring these two projects?
Which is why when Peace Corps Volunteers were necessarily evacuated from Kenya in July 2014, in response to increasingly violent and high profile incidents at the country’s border with Somalia, in coastal towns such as Lamu and Mombasa, and in the capital Nairobi, World Connect acted quickly. We connected with our established network of grassroots and NGO partners to plan the continued success and sustainability of active projects, and we sent program staff to secure areas of the country to make site visits and reassure communities that projects would be moving forward.
In this challenging time and context, we also met with the Peace Corps office in Nairobi to offer our steadfast support, as it remains operational in anticipation of Volunteers’ eventual return. We decided together to focus our ongoing collaboration on six projects that were in development at the time Volunteers were evacuated, but which had not yet launched. The projects represent a diverse set of communities, priorities and activities, but they are all anchored by inspiring local leaders, strong community support and momentum, and carefully thought out project and sustainability plans, developed as a collaboration between World Connect, Peace Corps, and each of the local communities. This is the World Connect way.
We recently checked in with our partners at Peace Corps Kenya, who continue working in service to the communities where Volunteers lived and will be placed upon their eventual return to the country. The latest updates on these six World Connect projects were overwhelmingly positive, with community leaders reporting how meaningful it has been to them personally and professionally for World Connect to believe in their projects, even in the absence of the Peace Corps Volunteers who originally connected them to World Connect. The results and successes of these six projects demonstrate the effectiveness and resiliency of World Connect’s grassroots project development model, as well as the effectiveness and resiliency of World Connect’s grassroots project partners.
For further information on the projects, follow the links below: