How WGEP is Responding to COVID-19 in Rural Kenya and Senegal

April 24th, 2020

Over the past several weeks, Women’s Global Education Project has adapted our programs to respond to the growing threat of coronavirus in the communities where we work. Our teams in Kenya, Senegal, and the U.S. have worked remotely since mid-March, and are working hard to provide resources in order to keep our communities safe and healthy, and to ensure that every girl has the opportunity to continue her education amid school closures.

PROGRAM INTERVENTIONS TO SUPPORT OUR COMMUNITIES

• Providing support and instructions on how-to create protective masks: We have contacted all girls in our scholarship programs with phone calls and texts via Whatsapp, both to check in as mentors to ensure that they are staying safe and protected from gender-based violence, and to send guidelines from WHO on how to avoid transmitting COVID-19. Our Kenya Program Director, Aniceta Kiriga, created a video to teach scholars how to make their own non-medical protective masks, and our adult literacy teachers created a COVID-19 prevention verse! WGEP grassroots leaders have also appeared on local radio programs to combat misinformation on the virus.
• Distributing soap and cleaning supplies: We have distributed soap and cleaning supplies to adult literacy students in Kenya (pictured above), and to several schools in Senegal to prevent the spread of COVID-19. One of the school leaders who received supplies remarked: “I hear on the radio the authorities asking the populations to wash their hands, it appeals to me but we find it difficult to even afford soap regularly to wash our bodies… this is why your help is remarkable. From now on I will be the first to observe the regular washing of hands.”
• Combating food insecurity: The pandemic has stretched resources thin in every country, and we want to ensure that our families have enough to eat while at home. In Senegal, we’ve distributed 25kg bags of rice to 266 WGEP scholarship recipients and their families. In Kenya, 203 girls and 456 adult literacy participants have received food from WGEP.
• Supporting remote learning: In order to best prepare students in Kenya for remote learning, we are distributing radios and lanterns to 203 girls in our scholarship program. The radios make it possible to tune in to remote lessons, and the lanterns help girls without electricity to study at night, after they have completed their daily household chores.