Could you do this job? - by Ben Skelton

When I first met Catherine in 2013 she had a very tough job on her hands.

Students at Kagasek Girls waiting for their first lesson of the day to begin

Catherine is head teacher of Kagasik Girls Secondary in Western Kenya, which provides a low cost education to girls who could not otherwise afford to progress beyond primary school. To get an idea of what this means to the students, this is how one of the girls sums up her life before enrolling:

"I was born in the year of 1995. I am the 6th born in a family of eleven children- five boys, six girls. One of my sisters passed away at the age of four. My parents have always been poor and can hardly afford one meal a day. There has often been quarrels and fights between my parents.

In the year of 2007, my mother left us and went to an unknown destination. She left us with a very irresponsible father who hardly buys food or clothes for us. During the year of 2009, all my siblings left home, men were employed as herd boys while my sisters were employed as house girls. Since then none of them have returned home. I have lived in a small hut with my irresponsible father. We eke our living out of begging for food from our neighbours.

During the year of 2010, I sat for Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) and I became the only one in our family to have completed primary school education. I never envisaged that my education could go beyond that level but, thanks to our neighbours, Kagasik girls secondary and the principal, I now have this opportunity. They understood my plight and came to my rescue.

I was admitted into form one in the year of 2011. The school has provided me with a school uniform and food during lunch. If there is no supper for us at home, the lunch we take at school keeps our lives moving."

This story is obviously very personal, which is why I have left out the name and changed some of the private details – however, it is true and very similar to the lives of all the girls enrolled at the school.

Although Catherine is a fantastic head teacher, she faced some serious challenges in keeping the school going. The school had no dormitories and so the girls were either walking long distances to school or sleeping in classrooms. Lack of books meant that reading materials had to be shared in class. The teenage and adult students were having to use broken desks that were too small for them as they had been salvaged from a local primary school. But above all, the school suffered from an acute shortage of clean water.

The girl’s main source of water was a dirty pond some distance from the school. This was shared with livestock - when Catherine first took me to visit there was a cow having a bath in it.  To make matters worse, the pond was on private land, and the landlord was threatening to prevent the school from accessing it. All this meant that the girls who were enrolled in the school had their education disrupted by the inevitable water borne diseases they contracted and the time lost in collecting water. Also, Catherine felt that a lot of girls who could afford to attend the school weren’t enrolling because of the state of the water supply and so were missing out entirely on their secondary education.

Given all this, we decided to help the school by installing rainwater harvesting on the classrooms. This system provides a year round source of clean water by hygienically catching and storing rain hitting the school roofs. It cost just under £1,500 to install and, because it such simple low cost technology, the school can afford to maintain it in the long term.

 One of the new rainwater harvesting tanks at Kagasek

The old water used for drinking on the left and new water on the right.

The impact of this small intervention has been dramatic. The school enrolment has increased from 50 to 200 students and Catharine has reported a significant reduction in water borne diseases. The water project opening ceremony was also pretty memorable with over 1,000 community members turning up to celebrate – you can see the highlights here - http://digdeep.org.uk/kagasek-primary-and-secondary/4576459746

I was lucky enough to have a cup of tea with Catharine at the school a couple of weeks ago.  She told me that while the school still has a lot of challenges the increased enrolment, and the extra funding and parental support this brings, have helped her solve many of the other problems she faced (while I was there a delivery of adult sized desks arrived to jubilant celebrations by the girls!). She also told me that if it wasn’t for the water project happening when it did, she would have given up and gone to teach elsewhere – her job had just been getting too tough. I personally think she was being overly generous and would have battled on regardless, but it’s always good to see how one of our projects can make such an incredible persons job a little easier.  

Dig Deep is continuing to support Kagasik Girls School. We are currently training teachers and students at the school in the best ways to improve hygiene and menstrual health management (which is one of the biggest barriers to women’s empowerment) and are constructing toilets so that the school has enough for the increased number of students. You can support these and other projects here - http://digdeep.org.uk/donate/4574813866

Catherine in her office at Kagasik Girls

Charities in Student Fundraising Forum-James Haughton

Dig Deep travelled down to London yesterday for the inaugural Forum meeting for charities engaged in student fundraising. It was a fantastic afternoon which brought together 9 charities in the sector. The conversation flowed and it soon transpired that our interests and the challenges we face were replicated across all of the organisations.

Amongst the attendees were Childreach International, Meningitis Research Foundation, AICR, Hope for Children, The Children's Society, Action Against Hunger, Practical Action, Breast Cancer Campaign and Dementia UK.

One of the most consistent aspects of the meeting was the extent to which the organisations involved were focused upon making the experience of students that fundraise for us as mutually positive as possible. It was clear that everyone strives to improve. Dig Deep relies upon our dedicated student volunteers for much of our funding and we are really excited to be able to share and learn with other charities. This is something charities must do more of across all areas of their operations. 

Dig Deep proposed the idea originally as a platform for sharing best practice and information about the sector and were delighted that pretty much every charity that was approached were keen to join in. We look forward to having some new organisations join at the next meeting hosted and chaired by Dementia UK.

The Forum adopted a set of aims and objectives which included the desire to improve recognition for all of the amazing work that student fundraisers make happen for us. It is under recognised amidst the prevailing cynical conception of a disinterested youth generation portrayed in public media. We thank you all for the incredible energy and drive you bring to Dig Deep and for the wonderful projects that save lives and break cycles of needless poverty in Kenya. You are the future of philanthropy.

Periods of change -by Anna Banyard

I really enjoy provoking men by talking about menstruation. I love being able to talk openly about menses and warning others to tread carefully around me during that ‘time of the month’ because the hormones can make me act deranged and frightening.

Even today in England there is a stigma associated with periods. Some men respond: ‘don’t talk about it Anna, it’s not sexy’ or ‘if you’re going to continue to talk about this I’m going to have to leave’. Maybe my delight in the discussion is a product of going to a girls-only secondary school, or maybe it’s a result of receiving adequate information growing up, teaching me it’s a normal sign of becoming a woman, and something to be proud of. I know men know that menstruation exists too, so me telling them I’m bleeding from my womb isn’t anything that should surprise them (even if it does scare them a bit).

Many girls in Kenya, suffer much more from the stigma surrounding menstruation due to a lack of information, cultural taboos, and a lack of resources to adequately manage it.

There are many factors impairing girls’ education in Kenya. Some of these factors include early marriage, often because families need the dowry to ease financial stress, a lack of family planning and contraception resulting in early and unplanned pregnancy and gender roles in the family requiring female members of the household to be responsible for cleaning, cooking, collecting water, providing firewood and looking after younger children. In addition, girls in many areas of Kenya are pressured to undergo female circumcision to varying degrees of severity.  On top of all this they must manage their periods as well!?

Menstruating for most school girls living in rural Kenya is difficult and problematic, to say the least. Without the necessary finances to access the safe and hygienic products on the market, they use whatever they can find: rags, cotton wool, tissues, and newspaper scraps. Some girls have no access to any of these things at all, and so use soil, leaves, grass, dried animal hides or simply nothing at all. While these methods are uncomfortable and most unhygienic, all are ineffective. Because of the shame and bullying numerous girls experience from their peers when they leak on to their chairs and uniforms, many stop participating or stay home from school. This amounts to girls missing approximately 10-20 percent of school days each year, leading to a major decrease in school performance and grades.

The lack of information these girls have available to them means they have questions not only just about how to take care of themselves, but also about what is normal, what’s happening to my body, and what it means?

Dig Deep in collaboration with our partner organisation WASH United have included a Menstrual Hygiene Management syllabus in a comprehensive Water, Sanitation and Hygiene programme targeting schools in Western Rift Valley, Kenya. We run workshops with young adolescent women to provide a platform of information sharing, demystify the menstrual cycle, understand body and mood changes during puberty, to know what products are available, how to use them hygienically and dispose of them correctly, and why girls should be proud to be women. Another goal of the workshops is to open discussions with boys, asking on their understanding of menstruation and normal adolescent changes in themselves as well as their female peers.

The workshop is done using a range of interactive activities and participatory games. We use a giant female reproductive system diagram to explain the anatomy (which looks weirdly like an angry cow face), show the stages of the menstrual cycle through an interactive calendar, and make bead necklaces with red and yellow beads to represent the menstrual cycle and help girls plan for their next flow.

We also invite external social enterprises with appropriate products that are renewable, reusable, low cost, environmentally conscious and hygienic to inform the girls of solutions that are accessible and preferable, that can keep the girls feeling secure enough to come to school all month round. The training is both fun and informative, which helps to effectively engage participants and ensure that information is well understood and memorable. We also focus on making the girls feel comfortable and safe. Even male teachers or facilitators are given names like Florence or Grace and asked about whether he prefers menstrual cups or tampons. By the end of the training, full of laughter and learning, many of the girls realize how much they like talking openly (sometimes graphically) about our flows, our personal tsunamis in our knickers.

Marketing dilemma's - by James Haughton

In the past few weeks I have been thinking a lot about Dig Deep and our marketing. Marketing sounds like a dirty word in our sector but charity revolves around the need to garner donations and maintain awareness. Neither requires secret strategies of manipulation(!) so I wanted to share with you something that we are giving a lot of thought to right now. It is a dilemma that a lot of charities have to face in presenting their work. 

The scales of the problems are breathtaking in Kenya and there is real human suffering. Presenting images of such suffering has worked for charities for a long time but doesn’t fit with our ethos. How can we present messages about Kenya and the work that we do without resorting to worst case portrayals of the situation there and imposing the narrow lens of our needs as an organisation and donor community?

We would never entertain here in the UK even asking permission to take a photo of a mother weeping, with a child dead in her arms due to cancer, to promote research into one of our primary threats as western people so what makes this acceptable to do during drought in somewhere like 'Africa'? Is it worth it if the money flows in? Or are charities not engaging enough with positive messages about change? Does the need to present more and more impactful images devalue the underlying messages?

Your donation to Dig Deep stops people dying, that is a fact but it is also a message that plays on guilt to a certain extent and reduces the complexity of the impact of the water crisis to a single negative message which is perpetuated continually. When you give to Dig Deep you unlock potential, remove the roadblocks of illness and missed opportunity for education/livelihood to allow the breaking of well-established poverty cycles. You can invest in this kind of change because the communities we work with have incredible energy and drive to carry this forward. They demonstrate this throughout the project process and by asking to work with us in the first place. Looking back on our impact report I can see this enthusiasm shines through over and over by the project reports. Our beneficiaries are active, engaged and not passive onlookers.

Photo taken at Ndanai, by community member Justus, of children learning to wash their clothes after the project opening. It is a good example of what we can learn from the images taken by community members as to the wider impact of accessible and clean water.

So how can Dig Deep put this undertaking to portray our work with sensitivity and communicate positively with our donors into practise? I’m not 100% there yet but the answer must lie within the promotion of direct interaction between our beneficiaries and our donors, to tell their story directly as opposed to their story told by us. One measure we have agreed to roll out is to provide cheap digital cameras to communities and to ask them to record the progress of their projects along with brief captions. Everyone changes when they are put on camera and no one likes being filmed unless it is on their own terms. By lending these cameras out, and with no specific direction, we hope to be able to have a unique insight into what our beneficiaries deem important about their communities, projects and their impact. We very much look forward to sharing these with you all unedited and unabridged.

International Women's Day 8th March 2014

Saturday marks International Women's Day. Dig Deep started with the support of women's activist Agnes Parayio, UN Person of the Year in 2005. Since then we have continued to work to empower women to overcome the challenges they face in Kenya.

In the majority of the communities we work with it is traditionally the role of women and girls to collect water and fuel. Through reducing the labour women face in doing this, our projects enable them to have a more equal role within their communities and also receive an education.

Here is one of many of our projects this year that assisted women directly:

Supporting mothers in building a school for their children – The Alton Masai Project

At Dig Deep we know how important it is that our projects are led by those that benefit from them – the local community. We also know that for a project to be successful, women must have at least an equal role to men in making it happen.

The Alton Maasai project is a community based organisation which was started by a group of women living the remote Maasai community of Oldanyati. They had a simple aim - to provide their children with the education that they never had. The local school was too far away for their youngest children to walk to so there was only one solution – they had to build their own pre-school.

After years of hard work they were able to see their dream realised with the construction of their first classroom. This incredible achievement took years of fundraising and months of back breaking work during the construction process, with the women carrying water over 7km to the construction site from the nearest river. Within the first month of opening the school had enrolled 150 students – however, there were no funds left to build toilets for the school. This was a serious health risk that threatened to undo everything that the women had worked so hard to accomplish.

Dig Deep was able to solve this problem through helping the Alton Maasai Project to construct latrines for the students and staff.  We are now working to improve the school’s water supply to ensure that the community have everything they need to provide their children with the education they had dreamed of. 

Dig Deep Impact Report 2012/13 - By Peter Fitzsimmons, Chairman of the Trustees

Peter Fitzsimmons is Chairman of Dig Deep’s Board of Trustees. Peter co-founded the charity with Jo Zeevi in 2007 and both remain actively engaged on the Board having overseen the rapid increase in the impact of Dig Deep in alleviating water poverty in Kenya.

"When we first conceived of Dig Deep in 2007, Jo and I were still students. We were introduced to an inspirational woman Agnes Pareyio, UN Person of the Year in 2005, and set out to raise £25,000 for our first project providing sustainable water supplies to the community of Sakutiek. We did this in 2008 and the project continues to provide clean water to thousands of people.

From those early days, we have come on leaps and bounds. That we have seen our income grow from £64,000 to £319,000 with just a single member of staff in the UK, Ben Skelton, for all but the final two months of this period is a testament to his dedication and the marvellous support of our volunteers. Their generosity of time and expertise combined with the support of several partner organisations has allowed us to grow during this difficult period for charities. The engagement of over 200 UK students as Dig Deep ambassadors has proved an innovative approach to fundraising and to be a mutually rewarding activity for those involved.

An early draft taken to Kenya to show our beneficiaries

In Kenya the dedication of our fundraisers has manifested itself in an unprecedented impact on a whole host of different projects this year, some of which are described in the following pages. They have been conducted in the same spirit of partnership as our first with Agnes and have been expertly overseen by Anna Banyard, a talented engineer and former volunteer who has joined our team.

This year I had the privilege of accompanying the Trustees on a visit. The highlight was undoubtedly the community’s response at Kagasek where a thousand community members assembled for the opening ceremony of the rainwater harvesting projects at the local schools. Everything I saw in Kenya affirms the direction Dig Deep is taking and the high esteem in which our community led model is held by the beneficiaries we work with.

When we look back on 2012/13 I have no doubt we will see it as Dig Deep’s take-off year. The progress organisationally and operationally has been exponential.

My sincere thanks goes out to all of our supporters and volunteers, whose gift of time enhances everything that we do."

Peter Fitzsimmons

VIEW IMPACT REPORT