Rural primary schoolchildren in Kenya are benefitting from an initiative to supply them with environmentally-friendly pencils.
Thirty pencils were donated to St Paul’s School in Gachororo, Juja, which is 30km north of Nairobi.
The December pencil donation drive was thanks to a collaboration between US-based non-profit organisation Let’s Create Together Foundation and Kenya-based pencil manufacturer Green Pencils Limited.
Let’s Create Together Foundation was founded by Ghana-born Rachel Panagiotopoulos in September 2020. The Foundation provides low-income families with support to thrive through chronic illness such as sickle cell disease. The Foundation also provides educational support to children in deprived African communities.
The pencils are made using a reverse engineering technique that takes recycled papers and turns it back to wood, according to Green Pencils Limited ceo Anthony Kirori.
In July and August, Let’s Create Together Foundation supplied 4,000 pencils to children at Nyacaba Primary School, and Kuraiha Primary School in Juja, through a collaboration between Rachel and her college friend Teddy.
Teddy was born in Kenya and during a trip home, visited a school near his home town only to discover that the children did not have the basic resources to learn.
“Not only did they not know what Google was or have access to Wi-Fi, fourth graders did not have access to pencils,” Rachel said on her organisation’s podcast published in September. “I saw one boy who was using a broken pencil that was so tiny, blunt and he was struggling to write with it.”
The Foundation donated materials including pencils to schoolchildren in Tolon, Northern Ghana, and gave the children a hot breakfast. As well as supplying school materials, the Let’s Create Together Foundation provides employment for mothers and pays the hospital bills for sickle cell patients in parts of Africa.
Find out more about the Let's Create Together Foundation here.
To read more about the fundraising work Ghanaians are doing in the charity sector, click below:
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