Maasai Girls Education Fund (MGEF)

MGEF is dedicated to educating a generation of Maasai girls in Kenya. MGEF provides scholarships for girls who would otherwise never go to school and those who would have to end their education early for cultural or economic reasons. To achieve its mission, MGEF is committed to having a majority of Maasai girls enrolled in school, educated, and working over the next 25 years. Through this effort, the next generation of Maasai women will have an opportunity for economic independence, which will improve the health and welfare of their families and their community.

MGEF is committed to helping each student achieve economic independence, whether through vocational school or college. MGEF also sponsors life-skills workshops for students, practical skills workshops for rural Maasai women, and AIDS education workshops for the communities, which are fundamental to the success of MGEF’s mission to educate a generation.

The MGEF model works because it was built in partnership with the community, and incorporates the social structure of the Maasai culture. During the past four-year pilot phase in the Kajiado District of Kenya, MGEF has prevented 22 unwanted marriages, enrolled seven girls who would never have gone to school, and prevented 24 girls from dropping out of school for economic reasons. It has brought agriculture to pastoral women living in a semi-arid region and taught rural women how to build more healthful traditional houses. It has increased awareness of gender inequity and the value of educating girls. MGEF is helping 52 girls realize their dream for an education and a better life through scholarships, from nursery school to college.

Over the next five years, MGEF will work to increase scholarships for needy girls and to advocate for girls’ education in order to reach a majority enrollment of Maasai girls in the Kajiado District. A majority of educated women can achieve a significant reduction in poverty and all of its consequences to women in the next generation. At the same time, MGEF will expand its Life Skills, Rural Women’s, and HIV/AIDS Education Programs.

The use of information and communication technologies is essential to MGEF’s management and growth in a variety of different ways. MGEF has two offices, one in Washington, D.C. and the other in Kajiado, Kenya. For the daily operations MGEF offices must use ICT in order to be in contact with one another. The scope of work that requires ICT is wide including: budgeting and banking matters, scholarship administration, workshop organization, strategic planning, and keeping up to date of the progress of the students. ICT also plays a major roll in the transfer of funds from the US to Kenya for both student school fees as well as office expenses. The use of ICT to wire school fees directly ensures a more accurate and more secure way for MGEF to ensure that each student is properly enrolled and her tuition paid.

For the first three years there was no Internet access in Kajiado. The then director would have to travel 50 miles in the local matatus (small buses bursting at the seams with passengers) to Nairobi once a week to get to a computer center. Obviously, this made communication very slow, as only one email exchange was possible per week. In July of 2002, MGEF received funding to open an office, which included a computer and Internet service. As Internet access becomes increasingly available in Kenya MGEF is able to be in direct email contact with schools and even some of the students. We currently are in email communication with 2 out of 10 schools.

As MGEF expands we plan to establish satellite community centers with Internet access to enable our grass-roots volunteers (members of our Division Committees) to communicate regularly with the Kajiado and US offices as well as each other. MGEF serves the entire Kajiado District, which is about the size of the state of Connecticut. Increasing communication through ICT, especially between the rural communities in the Kajiado District, is a critical component to increasing scholarships and achieving our mission to education a generation. The rural communities are extremely difficult to reach because of poor roads and transportation. Currently, some Division Committee members must travel a distance of 160 miles, taking approximately 10 hours, using local transportation to review applications for scholarships and discuss students in their Division. Our Division Committee members are responsible for identifying needy girls, make recommendations for scholarships to the board, for assisting with the school registration, delivery of uniforms and supplies, and monitoring school performance to identify problems early. ICT would accelerate the application process; improve the effectiveness of monitoring student performance, and the effectiveness of the work of the Division Committees.

The Maasai Girls Education Fund also has a website www.MaasaiGirlsEducation.org, which makes it possible to reach a wide variety of people and potential sponsors that we would otherwise not have access to. Through this medium we can inform the public about the importance of educating girls, the circumstances that prevent Maasai girls from getting an education, and the consequences to the Maasai and to Kenya. The MGEF website also provides the opportunity to sponsor a specific girl.

MGEF uses ICT to connect several other organizations to each other as well as to schools. Some examples of this include: Geoseed Project, www.geoseedproject.com, a volunteer organization that provides back issues of National Geographic Magazine to encourage educational interests in girls from developing nations; Girls Learn International www.girlslearninternational.org partners middle and high school classrooms here in the US with classrooms in developing nations to promote universal girls education. Through this networking MGEF can work with organizations that have similar and complimentary goals to achieve better education for girls.