Morokoshi Preschool

MDGs—Education, Poverty

About Us
Morokoshi Preschool provides young children with a basic education and has now admitted 73 students.  Japanese volunteers, who provided major support for the school helped to choose the name for the school, which in Japanese directly translates to “corn,” the crop once grown where the school now stands, and with hopes that the children will also grow up strong and resilient like this community staple crop.  Morokoshi already stands out academically as a top school in the area, and we
want to expand with a primary school as well as a public library and study space for all of the children in the region.

Our Community
Morokoshi Preschool is located in a rural farmland community just north of Nakuru, Kenya.  Our community relies heavily on agricultural
production and suffers in times of frequent drought, and the average family lives on only 50 cents a day. Political clashes recently
brought in an additional twelve children to Morokoshi, who along with learning the ABC’s, have gone through post-traumatic stress disorder counseling. Due to Aids and the 2008 political clashes, vivacious and dedicated grandmothers are raising many of the students.

Our History
When our founder, Steve Muriithi, saw the number of children in his rural farmland community not able to attend school, he decided to take this educational deficit into his own hands—and land.  Steve constructed a basic mud-walled classroom on his own property and hired his own teachers, placing the bulk of operating expenses on whatever support could be raised by his juice stand in town. Our Board of Directors, parents (and grandparents), and children are eager to ensure the educational pursuits of Morokoshi and begin our ambitious
plans for expansion, however financial strains make even modest upkeep costs challenging.

Watch a video of the work SpanAfrica volunteers conducted at Morokoshi in the spring and summer of 2009 set to a Kikuyu spiritual as sung by the women of the Nina Agricultural Initiative -- OSX (large) | OSX (small) | Linux | Windows

You can read more about SpanAfrica’s work at Morokoshi through the blogs of volunteers Kai Staats and Grace Proctor.