Day Care
This program was designed to help children who are in the age bracket of 2-5 years. The children are from families that are not able to send them to preschool due to one reason or another.
During the day in the slums, a lot of parents are out doing various jobs to earn an income. A lot of children are left on their own, which can be very dangerous for small children. Because their parents cannot afford to pay for the pre-school fees, children lack active care during the day and are prone to bad influence, dirt and abuse. The program gathers together the children from the slums and gives them care and protection during the day until their mothers pick them up in the afternoon. In addition they are introduced to early childhood education and are given at least one meal during daycare. Sometimes there is no food at home and this meal could be the only meal the child gets during the whole day.
The objective of the program is to develop a full professional pre-school where the children are prepared wholly to join the main stream primary school institutions, which are supposed to be free for all children in Kenya. However because of the limited funding that is provided to schools by the government, parents are charged with additional fees e.g. exam fees, school uniform.
Dan, a child in the day care, is a good example of the children’s difficult situation:
Dan 7 years, is the third born in a family of four children; Mary (6 months), Breakcities (14 years) and Carol (16 years). He lives with his mother, Kanini who is HIV positive and younger sister (6 months old) in Ngong Mathare slums, where they have been living for the past week after they were chased from Kibera slums during the post election violence. Dan’s father was killed during the violence, leaving Kanini alone and with no property in his village back at home in Kakamega. According to their custom, her children are not supposed to go back to her maternal home, so she cannot go back home and is forced to live in the slum. She does not have a job and her family lives in a pathetic state. Kanini had to distribute her older children among relatives because she could not take them with her. Breakcitie is tailoring in Kisesrian and Carol is back home staying with another relative. Kanini’s cousin Nduta took them in initially, but has now provided them with funds for their own home.
Kanini has lived in many other slums before coming to Mathare and she sees hope here to be able to support her family one day. Currently though, the family does not have money for any food and have not had food for a couple days.
Although, Dan is quite old, Living Positive Day care has decided to take him in, as they look for any available sponsor for him. Living Positive Program would like to link him with a sponsor so that he can continue with his education.
Community Library
Living Positive is in the progress of establishing a community library, where the bigger children can borrow books and get some space to read and do their homework. Some of the houses are too small and too dark for the children to study in. At the moment we only have a small collection of books, which are kept in the Living Positive office, and the children still lack a place where they can read.
Feeding Program
When we have enough food the program offers one meal per day to the disadvantaged children in the day care. This activity meets a lot of challenges especially these days with the ever-inflating food prices. Because 90 % of the family income in the slums is used for food, the price increase has hit these families especially hard. Also during the day the teacher takes up the responsibility of following up with the children who are HIV+ to make sure that they continue with their medical appointments and take their ARV drugs regularly.
To be able to run all these activities the program is running a support system, requesting well-wishers to contribute Ksh 1200(∼12€) per month per child to assist in the child’s administration of school uniform, food and the teacher’s salary for the children in the day care.
Well-wishers can also make food donations, which in the past have mainly been maize, beans and rice.
Godparent Sponsorship Program
The objective of the sponsorship program is to assist orphans whose parents died of HIV/AIDS and other AIDS affected children in all possible ways like payments of school fees and provisions of foods.
In this program, Living Positive links up children with sponsors who are willing to support a particular child’s education and/or other basic needs like food, transportation and medical expenses.
The sponsorship program is divided into day school & boarding school at primary level and high school. The godparents can choose to sponsor a child either at a primary school or high school level. At primary school level we would like to emphasize the benefits of sponsoring the child into a boarding school as the child is then removed from the slums and gets to grow up in a safer environment. The annual costs for different sponsoring schemes are as follows:
Normal day school at primary level 18000 (∼170€) per year
Boarding school at primary level 35000 (∼320€) per year
High school 35000 (∼320€) per year
If you would like to become a sponsor for a child, please contact us through the contact form so that we can send you some of the children’s profiles.
