JANUARY 2023 THANKS TO YOU….2022 YEAR IN REVIEW

"Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity,
in the finest sense of the word."-Göran Persson, former Swedish Prime Minister.

We found much to be grateful for in the Loita Hills last year. The many moments of utter beauty, joy, and progress we experienced give us hope for the future, and each challenge we wrestled with taught us something new. While those struggles often felt daunting and discouraging in the moment, they ultimately help make our work in Kenya wiser and make us more resilient as an organization.

Below are a few of the highlights we experienced in 2022. None of them would have happened without the support of all of you – the incredible though lower-resource communities in Kenya. To each of you, our deepest gratitude for making the following a reality:

• The opening of two more day secondary schools in the villages of Mausa and Olorte for a total of four schools. As of this writing, Mausa has almost completed three classrooms and Olorte has begun fundraising for theirs.

• Since schools reopened from COVID-closures, we've enrolled nearly 900 children into primary and ECD schools thanks to the incredible efforts of our 11 Team Angaza interns.

• Expansion of our 2021 pilot RACHEL program. We have now provided RACHELs and trained teachers from four high schools in their use. RACHELs are portable hardrives that can store entire websites and emit a wireless signal so computers, smartphones and tablets can access that content in remote regions without internet infrastructure. In the Loita Hills, RACHELs vastly expand the learning resources available to teachers and students. Teachers currently using RACHELs in their classrooms at our partner schools consistently report that they improve learning. Because of their low-cost, high-impact nature, in 2023 we will grow this program beyond our own partner secondary schools to other schools in the region.

Looking ahead in 2023, our goal is to finish construction of the four new day secondary schools we've launched with our partner communities in Loita; continue to identify and enroll out-of-school children into primary schools; expand our RACHEL program to additional high schools and explore expansion of our core programs to a neighboring under-served region of southern Kenya. Our wish for all of you, for our staff and for every single girl and family we work with is that you find much peace in this new year.

Photos of Irene with her aunt, top, by Ami Vitale, 2021.