Comprehensive healthcare for 240 girls in rural Kenya
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Project details
Education
🇰🇪 Kenya
👩🏿‍🦲 240
Additional data
240
ÂŁ1,000
ÂŁ1,000
ÂŁ0
This project will provide comprehensive healthcare for 240 of the hardest to reach girls in rural Kenya when they return for their first school term from January - March 2021.
Challenge
Girls have, unfortunately, but predictably borne the brunt of economic challenges, food insecurity, and social disruption. Well-documented practices of child marriage for material dowries, the pressure to engage in transactional sex for basic necessities, and gender-based violence have risen as lockdowns have dragged on. One result is staggering new rates of adolescent pregnancy - in one peer school, nearly 90% of girls became pregnant during the lockdown.
Solution
In partnership with WISER, comprehensive health care will be provided to 240 girls returning to school. This will include screening for and providing necessary care for early pregnancy, HIV, gender-based violence, endemic diseases such as TB, Typhoid, Malaria and Cholera, and now COVID-19.
Impact
Girls’ education is arguably the single most effective solution to global poverty, and COVID-19 has disrupted education for a generation of African girls, risking this critical investment. The Malala Fund predicts that the number of out of school girls will increase by 20 million before the COVID-19 crisis has passed due to early marriage, pregnancy, domestic responsibilities and labour, and gender-based violence.
WISER’s provision of comprehensive healthcare including treatment for diseases like COVID-19, Malaria, TB, and Typhoid, screenings, counselling, and treatment for STIs like HIV, and access to contraception and prenatal care will mitigate the threat of the pandemic to girls’ achievement.
More about WISER
WISER is a girls secondary school in Muhuru Bay, Kenya which takes a holistic approach to the boarding school environment. Unlike other schools in the area, WISER provides everything a girl needs to be successful including — clothes, books, safe housing, female role models, leadership training, healthy food, mosquito nets, HIV education, and essential medicine.