Despite the government introducing free primary education, over 1.7 million children still don’t go to school. The majority of these are street children, living in slums, or in minority nomadic communities.

The Kibera slum near Nairobi, is the third largest in Africa, housing over 700,000 people. It has no formal schools as the government doesn’t recognise slums as legal settlements. As a result, 37 per cent of children living there do not attend formal schools. Of these, over half attend 44 non-formal educational facilities.

These informal schools lack trained teachers, a teaching syllabus, learning materials, classrooms and toilets. However, children who don’t attend one of these schools often become involved in drugs in the slum or engage in child labour.

As part of Oxfam’s Urban Education Programme, we are supplying eight non-formal schools with teaching and learning materials, and paying the salary of 62 teachers. We also provide school meals, which have reduced the school dropout rate drastically. The result is that 2000 children are receiving quality basic education.

It also benefits 1,300 parents, who are free to search for jobs to sustain their families, while their children are in school.