We believe that informal settlements are home to some of the most resilient, creative, and hardworking people in the world. We partner with our community members to ensure that our children from the slum of Mathare have access to quality education helping them to complete elementary school, pursue higher education, develop leadership skills, enter competitively into the job market, and start their own businesses.
350 children have access to quality education through LEC’s community school that provides pre-primary education and primary education. As an organization, we strongly believe you can empower a community when you ensure its children go to school to get quality education but also ensure smooth transition from pre-primary to primary, to secondary school then eventually to college or university.
LEC provides educational scholarships to brilliant needy children to pursue secondary education. This include paying the school fees for these children who are vulnerable and would otherwise have dropped out of school, exposing them to teenage pregnancies, child marriage and other forms of exploitations.
Provision of quality education to pupils from underserved communities from pre-primary to secondary school is important for not only the immediacy of the opportunity and advantages that it gives the individual children and their families. Over time it is important because it shifts the prosperity of communities that have stuck in the cycle of poverty for decades with no way out.
The right to education is both an essential right for empowerment and a necessity to the realization of all other human rights. This is established in many legal human rights instruments and policies that include: the Constitution of Kenya 2010, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the UNESCO covenant against Discrimination in Education (1960, CADE), Covenant on the rights of persons with disabilities (CRPD, 2006) article 24 the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and the SDGs, no.4.