Pastor Eliud Misoi Primary School

The SAFINA Initiative completed the Pastor Eliud Misoi Primary School in 2013, and offers education to lower primary students (pre-k to 3rd grade in the United States) and upper primary students (4th grade through 8th grade). We built this school because there was no school in the area, and generations of children were growing up without the possibility of education. After ten years of operation, Pastor Eliud Primary has educated thousands of local children, and presently serves more than three hundred students per year.

The school’s challenges are largely a result of its success and its policy of never turning away a child who wants to learn. Classes designed for thirty now hold forty to fifty students. The government has been generous enough to pay the salaries of our Upper Primary teachers, but Safina bears all other costs, which includes books, two meals per day, field trip costs, building costs, physical education costs, uniforms, and Lower Primary teacher salaries.

Less than half of our families pay full tuition, which is $300/year for Lower Primary, and $500/year for Upper Primary. About twenty-five percent of families support the school through donations of corn, beans, flour, and other products of their subsistence farms. They also volunteer to prepare school meals and clean the facility. The final twenty-five percent are so poor that they cannot contribute anything at all.

When students are first admitted, they usually only speak the Nandi dialect of Kalenjin. Some are too poor to provide clean clothes, shoes, food, or books. We provide uniforms, which include shoes, to every child, feed every child, provide books to every child. We instruct them in Swahili, the national language, and English, the language of global commerce.