About Us
Mission
The mission of CMETrust is to advance education in Kenya by providing secondary school scholarships, with funds raised annually, to students from Mathare Valley Slum, Nairobi; and, to raise awareness in Canada about education and poverty in urban Kenya. These scholarships ($600 Cdn or 40,000 KSh) will cover the annual costs of secondary boarding school in Kenya, including tuition, room and board, transport, books and uniforms, and will be renewed annually based on progress reports. Cost per Student
The ultimate goal is to provide funding for students from Mathare to complete all 4 years of high school and receive their secondary school diploma. To date, 13 CMETrust scholarship recipients have graduated from high school (successfully completing their Kenyan Certificate of Secondary Education examination); we are currently in the process of piloting a post-secondary scholarship initiative for our alumni.
We are a volunteer-run, non-profit, charitable Trust (No. 83906 0720 RR0001) governed by a Board of Trustees and an executive committee. CMETrust has Chapters in Ottawa, Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo.
History
The inspiration for Canada-Mathare Education Trust came from one of the member’s experiences living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. Click here to read more. CMETrust was established in 2006 to raise funds to create secondary school scholarships for students from the Mathare slum.
Philosophy
CMETrust is a direct aid project facilitated through local people living and working in Mathare Slum (Benedict Kiage and Titus Kuria). We are working within the current status quo in Kenya, with Kenyans, to try to improve the lives of individuals and advance education in Mathare, one child at a time. We are not a development organization in the academic sense of the word; instead, we are using foreign aid to invest in building human capacity on the ground in Kenya, by increasing access to and attendance in secondary school. CMETrust is committed to gender equality and the principles of non-discrimination against all groups of people.
There are very few international NGO and aid organizations working in Mathare Valley Slum; most in Nairobi are focused on its biggest slum, Kibera (1.2 million people, versus Mathare’s 800,000). There are some local initiatives and many youth groups functioning in Mathare, but they have extremely limited resources and many, many children fall through the cracks. Our three Kenyans agents firmly believe, and we concur that by allowing children to continue their education, in a conducive learning environment, away from the many dangers associated with slum-life, we are helping to break the vicious cycle many children growing up in extreme poverty get trapped within.
An example of this is clearly illustrated in a (Dec. 2006) UNICEF report on the child sex industry in Kenya. Between 15,000-20,000 girls, in the coast province of Kenya alone, participate in the industry, many of them starting when they’re as young as 12 and 13, the age at which they leave primary school. It is possible that a program like CMETrust’s might have allowed some of these children to escape this fate, to continue in school instead of being forced to “work”, resulting in more educated members of Kenyan society. Numerous international organizations have linked greater education and literacy with decreases in prostitution, birth rates, STD and AIDS transmission, and increases in health, life expectancy and economic productivity. Numerous international organizations have linked greater education and literacy with decreases in prostitution, transmission of HIV and other STDs, and birth rates, as well as improvements in health, life expectancy and economic productivity.
