Kibera
International children’s charity Global Care has launched a special short-term campaign to help 56 children in the world’s biggest slum — Kibera — on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.
John White, chief executive of Global Care, said in Kibera people are so poor they buy sugar by the spoonful rather than the bag, and toothpaste by the squirt rather than the tube.
He said 1.2 million people live cheek-by-jowl in an area just five miles square, without sanitation, water, electricity or infrastructure of any kind. And this is where Global Care runs the Spurgeon’s Academy, a school for some of the poorest children on earth.
Places at the free academy are sought after and the waiting list is long. Applicants are carefully screened so that only children in the most desperate of circumstances are admitted.
At the start of the school year, in January 2012, when Global Care took on responsibility for Spurgeon’s Academy, the school admitted a further 56 children, bringing the total number of pupils to 415, and the finances of the school were already overstretched.
During July and August, Global Care’s online website — Pick The Bucket — was used to help raise enough funds for Spurgeon’s Academy.
Mr White said, ‘This is a fantastic school with a great reputation, which is literally changing the lives of children who have no other reason to hope, and we are proud to be associated with it.
‘Over the long term we hope to help the staff develop initiatives which will put the school on a more sustainable footing. However, in the short term, the school urgently needs funds to support the pupils it is already responsible for, especially these 56 new students’.
