The Orbit Village Project

Much of the solutions to the barriers in the project are monetary in nature, thus our application for the Elevate prize. Some of the challenges that the Elevate prize can help us address include our need to send our learners to better secondary boarding schools and college, increasing our farming capacity, installing electricity as well as acquisition of learning resources to equip the students for their future. 

Additionally, in the Covid-19 era, our distance learning program is limited by the lack of laptops and internet data for the families we serve. The prize will contribute to the purchase of tablets to equip learners and allow them to learn throughout the pandemic period, with schools experiencing an irregular academic calendar. Further, the project can utilize the prize money in paying tutors to equip our beneficiaries (mostly women and children) with English and communication skills. 

2020 brought unprecedented challenges to Orbit’s work in educating our beneficiaries. Within the next year, Orbit aims to continue protecting children and caring for the needy. Despite schools closing, we continue to provide distance learning services.Currently, we deliver lessons to over 300 students, anticipating that number will increase as county borders re-open. Unfortunately, we have been unable to reach our students stuck in rural areas, and unable to re-enter Nairobi due to country shutdowns. We continue to supply home-based food support. Through 2020 to 2021 we have experienced numerous challenges in making the campus Covid-19 ready.

In the next five years the project is aiming at empowering the community we serves by: 

• Enrolling more of our high school graduates into college and offering vocational training for students who are unable to advance to college. 

• Expanding the basket weaving program whose purpose is to empower the women in low income locations in Kenya. 

• Employing equipped counselors for PTSD, substance abuse, crisis pregnancy and child abuse at the Mathare center. 

• Expanding our services in Samburu with the construction of a church for charity work and community interaction.Furthermore, adult education is paramount in Samburu , and we wishes to offer it there.

According to the UN, poverty includes hunger & malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, social discrimination and exclusion as well as the lack of participation in decision-making. An average of 30 - 40% of girls are missing school due to inconsistent supply or lack of sanitary towels due to poverty. According to Menstrual Health report, one in ten, 15-year-old girls are having sex to get money to pay for sanitary-ware which contributes to girls dropping out of school due to early pregnancy. 

Currently, the Kenyan primary education is free but over 1.2 million children of school-going age are out of school and involved in practices such as child labor to supplement family income. There is also a 27% primary school dropout rate related to poverty issues. In Nairobi, under served communities living in informal settlements continue to face a myriad of challenges as they struggle to put food on their tables and educate their children. 

Our project is offering free/subsidized primary and secondary school education, employment and child protection to those in need. On a yearly basis, Orbit is empowering over 1500 people to become self-reliant citizens in their environment.

The Orbit Village is able to educate, feed, offer refuge, jobs, health care, guidance, and keep the sibling group intact. Thus, giving the parent/parents free reign to get their lives in control. Often, when Orbit assists the family by taking care of one, two or all children, the family structure will survive and children will eventually pull their parents up. When siblings scatter to relatives, join gangs, become sick, addicted, die, live in the street, or become parents, the family may never thrive and will remain vulnerable. Providing this sort of assistance has made a huge transformation in our community. 

A recent innovation: The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic forced all the schools to shut down as a mitigation strategy to reduce the spread of the virus. This directive affected education for the period of 2020 and March 2021. The lack of in person schooling has negatively affected our students as their days go unstructured and unmonitored.

 Orbit is offering an alternative to in person learning. Currently, we are delivering learning packets to about 366 available pupils throughout Nairobi through motorcycle deliveries and parcels. Our teachers are able to remotely provide Orbit pupils with lessons and return them marked.

The Orbit Village project serves approximately 1,000 people who receive services annually. Our programme typically aims to address the constraints that children face due to poor health and malnutrition, by providing material incentives for schooling for the children and/or parents or by reducing the cost of schooling. Further it is designed to address multiple barriers to education, such as school-feeding, which aim to both improve nutrition and reduce the cost of schooling.

We are centered around investing in children consumed by poverty through providing education, security, food and shelter, we believe in transforming the community one child at a time. By assisting families in caring for one or two children, Orbit reduces the load of overwhelmed parents coming from poor background. In addition the education and 1300 meals provided daily to hundreds of children, and home-based food support, allows these parents to invest the little money they earn in other necessities.