Employees of Plan

A Plan funded water tank.

Plan has been in Kenya for over thirty years. Plan has eight Program Units: Kwale and Kilifi in the coast, Machakos and Tharaka in the eastern part, Homa Bay, Kisumu and Bondo in Nyanza and an urban program in Nairobi. The urban program mainly targets the urban poor, all the rest are based in the rural areas. The overall goal of the Plan programs is to have transformed institutions and societies that respect and fulfil rights of all children in Kenya. The Plan headquarters of Tharaka North are in Gatunga, the Tharaka South headquarters are in Marimanti where I have been. The district of Tharaka covers an area of 1570 sq. km and has a population of about 130,000 (projected from a 1999 census), an average household in Tharaka is five. Tharaka North has 61 primary schools, 56 of those are public schools and five are private schools. In the public primary schools there are a total of 15,272 students, where 7,525 are boys and 7,747 are girls. In the private primary schools there are a total of 827 students, where boys accounts for 421 and girls for 406. Tharaka South has 99 public primary schools in them there are an estimate of 13,327 boys and 8,974 girl, making it a total of 22,301 students in total. There are 24 secondary schools with a total population of 2,122, where boys account for 1,252 and girls for 870.  There are many factors impeding learning in both Tharaka South and Tharaka North some of which are: long distances to schools, gender disparity in access to schools, unfriendly learning environment, understaffing in schools, school levies, inadequate skills in gender responsive pedagogy, high drop-out rates for girls, inadequate support to children with special needs, discrimination of children living with disabilities, corporal punishment, child labor, child sexual abuse, etc.

The people trying to do something about this are, in Marimanti, Plan’s thirty five employees. Only one of the employees lives permanently in Tharaka. All of the rest of the employees lives far and wide over Kenya. One of the employees’ family lives in Kisumu and another’s close to Nakuru. They visit their family as often as they can, but as it takes a long time to get back and forth so they cannot do it too often. They are all given housing in Marimanti, and are therefore not chosen because of where they are from, but because of their qualifications and many of the employees has been to university. They have improved the learning environment in some schools through: improvement of the schools infrastructure, provision of school furniture, provision of learning and instructional materials, capacity building of teachers in curriculum delivery methods, mentorship program for students, capacity building of teachers on gender responsive pedagogies, awareness creation and parental education on importance of education and Rights of the Child, child protection sessions with students, etc. I visited two schools with two of the Plan employees and I could really see much of what they have achieved on a physical level, they have built classrooms, and set up a lot of water tanks. Water tanks are very important in this area because there are no river nearby, so they are completely dependent on rainwater. All of the thirty-five employees of Plan Marimanti, and Plan employees all over the world deserves a good cheer, they are changing things for the better for children everywhere.