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Inside Simwood

An update from Africa

Parnita Nimbalkar

13th August 2025

You might recall our announcement that we were supporting ChallengeAid, a wonderful charity supporting amazing work in the slum settlements of Kenya. They punch so far above their weight and quietly make a tangible difference while the higher profile NGOs avoid the areas they operate in and virtue signal from afar – there was too much impact and synergy there for us NOT to help. 

More than 20 years old now, ChallengeAid provides real quality education, teacher training, accelerated literacy lessons, sanitation upgrades, online lessons to exam level and other programmes through Schools of Hope.

Schools of Hope serve as libraries, stocked with up-to-date Kenyan syllabus textbooks, homework clubs, and youth centres run by dedicated volunteer supervisors, most of whom are alumni. They run these SoH in the evenings, weekends and holidays with sports, life-skills, music, drama and chess. For the past 12 years, they have also run a complementary sanitary pad programme for all adolescent girls attendees.

In conjunction with their Schools of Hope and running in tandem, they also facilitate:-

  • Literacy training – it is estimated that over two-thirds of children living in the slums are at least two years below the expected reading age, so working in partnership with Strathmore University, almost 200 volunteers of University students and our volunteer supervisors have taken 2,000 pupils out of illiteracy in the past year. We are now on target to do the same over the next 12 months.
  • Education in a suitcase – rewards for completing maths drills online, working in partnership with Smiley charity, an initiative which is funded as a cryptocurrency that can be traded for food stuffs and goods in local shops, all underwritten by the Icelandic Government.
  • Online lessons – teachers in the UK delivering online lessons in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Maths and English to Kenyan A-level equivalent exam classes each day. These online lessons are delivered into Informal schools at the end of the school day. To aid this initiative, they have created basic science laboratories in some of the informal schools in the slums. Previously, most of these children were sitting science exams, of which 50% is practical, without ever having even set foot in a laboratory.
  • Teacher training – in-service training for teachers from informal slum schools, updating them with modern trends, techniques and developments suitable for use in the Kenyan classroom. In their last in-service training, they had an attendance of 153 teachers, and

when asked how many pupils they would be teaching just once in the following week, the answer came back as 26,000. That is impact!

  • Sanitation and sustainability – they’ve built toilets in almost all the Schools of Hope with the aim for each to have at least separate facilities for male and female, complete with a water point. In the areas around the Schools of Hope, their leaders organise clean-up efforts at least once a month to keep the surrounding area free of rubbish and litter to help create cleaner and healthier communities in the slums.
  • Empowering young Maasai girls – supporting young girls with literacy and numeracy training and then helping to protect them from the cultural norms and expectations of FGM, polygamous early marriage and the subsequent catastrophe of early childbirth, often in hopelessly insanitary situations, let alone hospitals with medical supervision.

We’re proud to support Challenge Aid every month in their amazing work.

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