Thankful for our network of NGO and CBO organizations that all come together!
We have received a few questions in the last 24 hours about what we are doing about COVID-19 in our service area of Kenya. We share your concerns!
Yesterday, we had to make the difficult decision to temporarily suspend our face to face activities in the community per the updates from the Kenya Ministry of Health (MOH) and Government. We know that we must do our part in supporting the asks of the KE MOH and KE Gov't for social distancing. For the environment that we work in, we find the idea of social distancing to be a real challenge, but we still must do our responsible part in it all. Before our decision was made to suspend our activities, we were online in our group of fellow NGO's and CBO's that called a meeting together (we are so thankful for all of our partnerships and relationships that come together as a team for discussion on so many different community issues!). After having discussion, all of us stood together in our decision to support the asks of the KE MOH and Gov't and suspend our activities. We must do our part in not giving the opportunity for any spread of COVID-19. It is why the schools closed and it is why businesses and companies are reducing operations. Kenya wants to make the attempt to flatten the curve too even earlier than some other places did.
With the schools closing in Kenya, our Shining Scholars and Shining Brighter college students are certainly impacted. Even though a break was near, exams and content are on hold and the guaranteed lunch at school is no longer available from the closures. There will be school locations that defy the total closure and still feed in the community (we know of one already from our School Principal group online). Super markets and market stalls are facing a burst in buying of supplies just as we have seen in other places around the world.
(Photo credit: Kenyans.co.ke)
With market stalls and stores getting ready to face future shortages, we called upon one of our relationships in the community that owns a food stall. We have known her since 2013 and have been doing business with her since. We were able to get many bundles of Ugali flour (Unga) pulled from the storage location for this stall and delivered to our project space very late last night. It took a few piki bike trips to make it quick thanks to our driver friend that we appreciate so much! We were quite thankful that we were one of her long term customers she was still serving in that kind of quantity at normal pricing, we were even happier to share the contact with our network of NGO and CBO friends so they could do the same. We are a team in the end and we enjoy sharing information and working together!
This morning, we called each of the Shining Scholars to come and receive packages of Ugali flour to take home, one girl at a time. While this does not solve the impact of the pandemic, it was still an action step we could take to help the the lack of the guaranteed lunch for our Shining Scholars from school closures at this time.
As our group network of NGO's and CBO's continues to meet and/or we receive updates from the KE MOH or Government, we will share more! This Sunday, we have another online meeting of the NGO and CBO network.
Thank you for standing with us at this time.
- The Angaza Project
