As our secondary school graduates await to join college, Hatua, during their gap year offers a peer mentoring program designed to engage and nurture our secondary school graduates with hands-on leadership and soft skills development opportunities.
But to stop the spread of the coronavirus, the department readjusted its training and is now using the Google Classroom App to conduct their mentoring classes online. So far, the students have been mentored on Time Management, Effective Communication, and Stress Management and they look forward to covering Healthy Relationships and Citizenship in the coming weeks.
The biggest challenge so far has been the technology lapse as we still have a few students who do not have access to a smartphone while some also lack access to internet data bundles. An average of 40 gap year students are attending our online training out of 45.
Before the coronavirus, we had trained our gap years as peer mentors on Financial Literacy and they had already reached a total of 2,338 students in ten secondary schools in Likoni. Hatua’s peer mentoring program topics rotate annually among financial literacy; reproductive health & healthy relationships; drug abuse prevention; and civics & countering violent extremism every year.
With all that is going on, we still have good news. After revising their college course selections, all our gap year students got selected to pursue their desired selected courses in various tertiary institutions in the country. They are also still receiving their monthly stipend which they save as well as use to purchase internet data bundles for online learning. Below are some amazing ways our gap years are using their stipend:
Brian Siari and Christine John are two of our gap years who are still saving up to buy a laptop that they will use when they join college. However, they each still gave Ksh.1,000 ($10) to their parents to buy food in their house this month.
After buying data bundles, Boniface Waithaka also used his remaining stipend to buy food supplies for his family. Both his parents’ incomes were affected due to the coronavirus and his family can only afford to eat one meal a day at the moment with priority being given to his two younger siblings.
Please donate today to feed a family that has lost income because of the coronavirus.
As we continue looking for innovative ways to continue empowering the lives of young people in Mombasa, we are encouraged by a quote by Confucius that says, ‘Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall’.