Enkisoma
Overview
In Maa, Enkisoma means “education.” We started The Enkisoma Project to aid with increasingly low literacy levels among women and girls. We work with our women’s groups to hold literacy trainings and improve reading and writing skills, while supporting women in keeping their children in school.
The Foundations
The main objective of the Enkisoma Program is increase literacy in our communities, especially among women and girls. We hold literacy sessions during women’s group meetings, where women practice their reading and writing skills. In additional to increasing literacy, we also aim to encourage more women to learn about accounting, and improve financial literacy to aid small business development. With an increase in literacy rates, women also gain more autonomy when it comes to business communication, signing loans, and starting businesses.
We also work to build pathways for positive relationships between parents and students, particularly female students, as we provide parents with the tools to campaign for girls’ education. We teach women how to use readily available materials to support their children’s education and provide them with additional resources to ensure their children can remain in school.
Our Impact
Although this is our newest program, we have been able to make quite an impact. By enhancing educational sessions and improving access to resources we have been able to increase our beneficiaries’ ability to accurately read, write and count. These improved literacy rates have in turn improved their entrepreneurship skills and amplified their income streams through business development. The program has also improved their ability to support their own children in grade school as they share their newly learned knowledge.
Through this project, we have also talked with 540 parents from four villages to emphasize girls’ education and parental engagement in children's education. Additionally, we worked to increase parent engagement by holding five parent meetings with a total of 200 parents. We also worked with our women's groups to reach an additional 420 women to further this effort and better understand the challenges that students face while at home. Through these meetings, we found parental engagement to increase by 5%, as testified by teachers.
WAEV reserves a small portion of this program’s budget to address pressing issues in primary schools, in order to ensure the program is effective and beneficiaries have the right tools to succeed. For example, we have worked to provide water and meals for students, as well as classroom resources such as desks, books, studying d-lights, and pens, pencils and exercise books to aid the program.
Future Plans
In the upcoming year, we aim to increase literacy levels with our current beneficiaries, in addition to expanding the program to work with even more women. We look forward to fostering an environment where women and girls have all the knowledge and resources they need to succeed.
