Friends of Ngong Road

We empower Nairobi children living in poverty to transform their lives through education and support, leading to employment.

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Improving the donation experience

Our US team has been hard at work rebuilding the system we use to track your donations. When Friends of Ngong Road was founded 16 years ago, most of our supporters mailed checks to our founding board members, and then to our PO Box.

Eventually, our team managed to initiate sponsorship donations via automatic credit card withdrawals. However, we still manually tracked, responded to, and handled each donation. This resulted in a significant time investment from our US team for basic data input, sometimes resulting in human errors.

Over the years as we have grown and added more students, created a more robust program, and as inflation and other costs have increased, the amount of time our staff has spent manually typing your donations into our system has increased. 

We realized that this model was no longer sustainable, and our US team went to work to build a system that would support automated donation tracking. There were 16 years of donations to comb through, sort, and organize, then we rebuilt our existing system to support automation, and finally, in the past few weeks, we have been able to launch the newly built automation to our website. You likely won’t notice a difference quite yet (there are big improvements coming your way soon!) in the way you make donations on our website, but behind the scenes your donations now flow directly into our system, allowing our US staff to use their time in more meaningful and impactful ways.

In the upcoming year, we aim to introduce an account management system for donors via the sponsor portal. This system will enable sponsors to log in, efficiently handle their sponsorships, modify credit card details, and even include more sponsorships. All the work completed over the past year has made these types of improvements possible

With advancing technology’s accessibility, our organization thrives, expanding to serve an increasing number of students effectively.

We are grateful to have a board that understands the power of technology and is willing to support new ventures to ultimately support the efficiency of the teams both in the US and in Kenya

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TechMates

We consider students fully transformed once they are employed. To enhance their employability, we launched several employment programs, one of them being the TechMates program. TechMates is our new technical training program focused on IT and digital marketing.

Launched in September 2021

The program began in September 2021. Seven graduates have benefited from this program so far. Each year we aim to recruit at least two interns every six months. During that period, they undergo basic technical training in WordPress website programming and design. After the training, they develop their websites and work on website enhancement and digital marketing for Friends of Ngong Road( FoNR), Ngong Road Children’s Foundation (NRCF), and Karibu Loo as an implementation of the skills acquired during the training. This enhances their technical and interpersonal skills which are key in the professional world.

Techmates Structure

The program is generally divided into two paths that individuals can choose to take depending on preference and area of expertise. They include :

  1. Developer Path – Generally involves web development and software creation and management.
  2. Digital Marketing Path

Experience with clients

We also seek clients that require freelancing services and provide them with TechMates. Our current customers include

  •   Lido Nation a blockchain educational website whose focus is to help educate people about blockchain technologies. We provide we developments and content translation services for them.

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Meet our new Case Manager: Wence

“The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet” – this quote would best describe Wenceslaus right from childhood.He lived with his grandmother, the sole breadwinner, and had a difficult childhood, because his grandmother struggled to provide for himself and the family. Wence joined the Ngong Road program in 2009 and his case manager described him as being “polite, well-disciplined, and impressive”.

His leadership skills evident in high school, including dorm and hockey team captainships at Parklands High School. He took major steps even as a young person to become a visionary leader.He pioneered the Youth Peer Providers (YPP) program, a crucial component of students’ Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) training.

Wence is loved by especially the youngest students in the program and takes pride in being a major contributor and facilitator of the Saturday programs. At Kabete National Polytechnic College, he studied social work and community development while volunteering as a facilitator for the Saturday program. He would interact with the kids and created a strong bond, not yet knowing that he would soon get the chance to work with the kids as their case manager.

Wence’s love and commitment to work during his internship led to his hiring as a case manager in the primary department in 2022. He enjoys working as a case manager to express gratitude for the organization that transformed his life and provided him with education. Wence hopes to accomplish a lot for the organization and for himself as he maneuvers through and explores his career.

Thanks to Friends of Ngong Road and Ngong Road Children’s Foundation for transforming this young man’s life through education.

Welcome, Wence!

Friends of Ngong Road 2020 Kenya Visit – day 3 – Saturday Program – Introduction to Ultimate

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Karibu Loo Corner

Karibu Loo has rebuilt the business and is ready for a new year

With the country’s ongoing vaccination campaign and following the relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions, the Kenyan economy is gradually recovering from Covid-19 impacts. 

Rebuilding the Business after Covid-19

The impact of Covid -19 has resulted in 2021 being a rebuilding year for Karibu Loo. In 2021, we focused on growing long-term rentals, now constituting over 60% of this year’s total revenue.  Our primary marketing tool was digital advertising campaigns through Google and social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter). The campaigns have yielded nearly 80% of our sales, including long-term commercial, coming through direct inquiry without a sales intermediary.

Long-Term Business is our mainstay

Since the onset of the pandemic, long-term business (primarily construction companies) has been our mainstay in revenue and has enabled us to survive through the pandemic. Short-term business primarily relies on events, and their return has been slower.

During the last three quarters of 2021, we recorded a rapid increase in long-term revenue peaking at 25 cabins per day in the fourth quarter. In recent months, the long-term has contributed almost 70% of the total monthly revenue for Karibu Loo, the highest level we have recorded since inception of Karibu Loo. We believe this trend will progress next year, creating a solid revenue generation base. 

2022 Business Outlook is bright

The coming year outlook remains uncertain and contingent on the impact of the Covid-19 variant (Omicron). We anticipate serving the BATUK (British Military Training Unit Kenya) organization.  They train troops in Nanyuki, about a four-hour drive from Nairobi. BATUK usually schedules military training in phases throughout the year so we anticipate supplying at least 40 cabins per day for three months beginning in January with the possibility of extending through the rest of the year. Despite the complex operations cost behind the business, it provides a significant revenue boost.

Staff Update on Covid-19 

For safety, we urged staff to vaccinate, aiding in Covid-19 prevention, risk reduction, and client protection during services. Currently all our staff are 100% fully vaccinated (complete doses).

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Saturday Development Program

Each Saturday we host a child development program with the help of our Case Managers. The program consists of fun activities surrounding a wholesome fresh lunch prepared and served by our cooks. A nurse is on hand to distribute multivitamins and deworming pills regularly and meets with individual children who are ill, referring them to clinics or prescribing treatment as appropriate. The nurse also gives health talks to different age groups.  The Saturday Program Coordinator organizes activities geared towards cognitive development and social and physical development. We invite volunteers to support running the activities as well as bring in new ideas. The activities rotate between the following themes;

  • Cognitive activities include a book reading and puzzle games
  • Olympic athletics which is all about running (which Kenyans are famous for)
  • Clubs and talent search including drama, music, and Taekwondo
  • Ball games such as  soccer and Katie (dodgeball)
  • Crazy Olympics. This includes crazy games such as the banana foot pass relay, balloon relay, three-legged relay, and sack relay.

In 2020, we put the  Saturday program on hold due to  COVID-19. This dealt a big blow to our students as the Saturday program is a good opportunity for kids to build memories, friendship, and sportsmanship, and enjoy a “sumptuous” meal together. We resumed the program in May of 2021 but, despite all the hype, the attendance was very low as most parents and guardians were very cautious about releasing their children due to COVID-19 fears. It was equally challenging for the program coordinators to try to organize activities with less contact and ensure kids observed the Ministry of Health guidelines such as wearing masks. However, as time passed more students attended the program and in this last quarter of the year, we reached over 90% attendance. During the holiday break, we also had a very high attendance of high school students which means we will need a bigger and better field next year. 

The August summer camp was also canceled due to Covid-19 and with the change in the school calendar, the Saturday program has now become the new “mini-camp”. The Saturday program has defined the true meaning of the NRCF family as the staff and students come together to share joy and happiness with each other and forget about the hustle and bustle of the slums and city. It is also during the Saturday program that the Case Managers get to do further follow-up on the child’s wellbeing.