NAJMA: PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENT

“With an education, I can help my family and community.”

Najma attended primary school in the Loita Hills, a remote, rural region of Kenya. She is a determined, vibrant girl who wants to be a judge when she grows up. “In my future, I am really dreaming something big, so that I can help my community, and my family. I want my future to be so lovely. I really want to be a judge,” she notes, “because being a judge, it is supporting the truth, not the lies. Yes. That’s why.” You can meet Najma here in a short three minute video we edited on 2023 for one of our key foundation partners, the Alice C. Tyler Trust. 2021 Interview footage courtesy the amazing Ami Vitale.

In 2021, Najma successfully passed her high school entrance exams with high marks and started classes at a girls’ secondary boarding school in July of 2021 with the support of her family and a scholarship from For the Good. As of June 2024, she is now a senior in high school, with one more term to go. Typically only one in 15 girls in the region Najma lives graduates from primary school and transfer onto secondary school. Numerous barriers keep them from the classroom as they near adolescence. Primary among these are community traditions that foster FGC and early marriage as a way to ensure a daughter and families’ futures, and a lack of access to an affordable school. There was only one secondary schools in the entire 400 square-mile region she lives; the only high school was an expensive boarding school.

Early in 2020, for the first time, eight young Maasai girls - one pregnant, one already a young teenage mother - and ten boys started their lessons in the first affordable day secondary school several hours away from Najma’s home community. Efforts to open schools, enroll out-of-school children, and teach local leaders to speak up for girls' education are beginning to create the change that we, fathers, mothers, girls and communities hope to see happen for girls. Our goal is to work with communities to create a world where Najma can gain the formal education to make her dream become a reality while proudly honoring her Maasai culture, family and community.