Piave Primary School is a public school in Njoro District located in the village of Kahuho, founded in 1997 due to overcrowding and high enrollment at the mother school Ngano. The school is located 4km from the Njoro Nakuru Road. The parents managed to contribute some money to construct 4 mud classrooms originally, since then the government and other civil partners have constructed 7 permanent classrooms. The area is poverty stricken with a high incidence of HIV/Aids which left many grandparents raising their grandchildren. The majority of the population are victims of land clashes between 1992-2007 and have formed a permanent community in Njoro. The primary source of income is small farming.

The population for the village is approximately 5,000 with the population of Njoro being over 30,000. It is located in the Rift Valley and is part of Nakuru County in Kenya. The school has enrolled 500 pupils.

 

The nearest source of water for the school is a river roughly 4 km away. The community uses the river water for drinking, bathing, and their animals. The children are asked to carry their own containers of river water to school for drinking. No water is available for cleaning latrines, handwashing, cooking, or drinking at the school premises. The IGAs the school utilizes currently is fundraising through the parents which is not effective. It is likely that when they get water at the school they will take advantage of their additional 2 acre plot and utilize this for gardening and sell the produce to help raise funds for the school as well as feed the students.

The school faces a number of challenges:

  • Inadequate educational facilities, poor sanitary facilities, lack of access to water.
  • High incidence of disease in the school stemming from lack of access to water and unsanitary behaviours.
  • There are inadequate desks and quality classrooms – no windows in some classrooms, wind and rain enter the building.
  • Inadequate staffing in the schools (qualified teachers). Therefore, the teacher – pupil ratio is too high. Lack of an administration block, administration/teachers are using a classroom as their office currently.
  • Inadequate teaching materials such as boards, text books, teachers’ tables and chairs.

Our plans to improve the water, health and sanitation conditions in the school include:

  • Drilling of borehole to provide access to water
  • Construct/rehabilitate latrines to meet standards for quality and ratio of pupils to latrine
  • Construct handwashing facilities
  • Promote good hygiene practices among pupils through Children’s Hygiene and Sanitation Training, build capacity of teachers by training them in CHAST and providing master copy of instruction materials, form school health club.
  • Move and fence refuse pit away from the classrooms and area children play.
  • Bring drip irrigation technology and train key representatives from school and community on operations and maintenance for sustainable feeding program.
  • Construct kitchen facility for feeding program