This story first appeared in The Star newspaper.

12-year-old Diana Anyango lives in Korogocho, the fourth largest informal settlement (or urban slum) in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s a place where people live in close quarters, often without power or access to running water. Makeshift houses constructed from wood and iron are raised precariously two or three floors high. Clothes are hung out to dry on old electricity cables, stretched across narrow alleyways. From a wooden balcony, Diana looks out over the rusted rooftops to the formal houses and tower blocks beyond the settlement. The street below, usually busy with vendors and “boda-boda” motorbikes, is half empty. A few pedestrians walk past wearing face masks.

Buxton Gitimu, 11, lives with his family in Huruma informal settlement, Nairobi. One of his favourite things to do is playing football with his brother Joseph. The boys are very close. Together, they race around a football field at Salama Primary School with their coach, practicing tackles and other moves. Afterwards, they do keepy uppies, counting to see how long they can keep the ball in the air. The football field is normally full of children, but today it is empty because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading “Children with disabilities learn through sport during COVID-19” →

It is a scorching hot morning in Turkana County, northern Kenya. The ground is dry and sandy, punctuated with small gorse bushes and occasional trees. Tall, thin termite nests point like fingers at the cloudless sky. In some places, dust swirls in miniature whirlwinds. Yellow locusts swarm around the remaining vegetation, stragglers from the recent locust invasion. It seems barely habitable, but people survive here, herding hardy animals like camels and goats, and moving around in search of pasture.

Naipa village, however, is like an oasis in the sandy almost-desert. A solar powered water system pumps groundwater up into overhead tanks on scaffolding, from which it flows down to taps in a school and seven villages. At the tap nearest the pump, a group of women and children have gathered to collect water. The Turkana are tall and striking. In rural areas, they still wear traditional clothing – beautifully coloured and patterned ‘leso’ wraps, headscarfs for balancing water containers and bead necklaces. They smile and laugh as they fill up their buckets and jerrycans. A boy walks past’ leading a line of well-fed camels to the water trough.

It’s a sunny late afternoon at Agape Children’s Ministry in Kisumu. Children run around, playing football or netball with staff. Others play checkers with stones on a painted table top. A girl swings on a tyre, trying to make it go as high as she can. Shouts and laughter fill the air. Meanwhile, a young man looks pensively at a row of bunk beds in the boy’s dormitory. Unlike the children outside, most of whom will be in the institution for just a few months before returning home, Samora spent almost his entire childhood in care.

Continue reading “Different lives: care leaver sees children returned to families” →

The sound of a bell rings out to announce that the school day has just finished at Kathebwe Primary School. It’s a hot, sunny day. Children run outside and start to disperse. Some go home to nearby villages, while others start kicking a ball around on the school field. A third group joins their mothers and younger siblings, who are sitting with a hundred or more flood victims in the shade of a large tree. Since the heavy rains and floods of early March, this school has doubled as an evacuation centre. Continue reading “On the move: mobile clinic helps malnourished children” →

It was the middle of the night on 7 March when Annie decided to flee her home with her children, including baby Ndaziona, who had been born just two days before. It had been raining for four days, the nearby Shire river was rising, and the family’s mud brick and straw house was becoming precarious. Annie woke in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. “I looked outside and saw lots of water coming,” she recalls. “I took the children and ran. We got maybe 10 or 20 metres before the house collapsed behind us.” Continue reading “Water of life: helping two-week-old Ndaziona survive” →