Because with your support they are in school.

Because with your support they have beds, clothes, and shoes. Because with your support they can, for the first time in their lives, learn in safety and be taken care of when they are sick. For the first time they have hope that they can be doctors, nurses, and businesswomen, and realize ambitions they have only dreamed of.

December 2011.

Dear WISER Supporter,

With your help we have made great progress in improving life in Muhuru Bay.  However, as we grow to include 90 girls in our signature secondary school program, 700 boys and girls in our primary school program, and extend clean water to 20,000 people throughout the Muhuru Bay community, our costs are increasing.  We hope you will be able to match or even increase your gift from previous years to support WISER in its continued growth and success.

You have been there for WISER girls in the past.  Every donation helps. Help us buy mosquito nets, sanitary pads, soap, and books.  Help us feed them, give them beds to sleep on, and clean water to drink.  Help us give them the education they deserve. Then they will do the rest, helping their community become economically sound and healthy. Help a WISER girl become a leader this holiday season.

Please give today.  Keep these girls, and 30 more in the new year, smiling, joyful, and hopeful.

Donations can be made online  and checks can be mailed to WISER, attn Karen Gray, Box 90519, Duke Global Health Institute, Durham NC 27708-0519.

We thank you, they thank you, and their community thanks you.

Sherryl Broverman, Chair WISER NGO

Nike’s Charity Fund Seeks to Help Unleash the ‘Girl Effect’

http://philanthropy.com/

By Caroline Bermudez
In many parts of the world, girlhood is a blip, a brief period in one’s life that gives way quickly to more serious matters such as marriage and childbearing. Millions of girls undergo these rites of passage with silent assent. They have no control within their needy families, for whom betrothal means the acquisition of livestock, fabric, or money essential to their survival.

Some, like Anita Kumari of Bihar, India, speak out. They refuse to accept their fates. At 15, Anita enrolled in a training program to become a beekeeper, the only woman amid a group of men in their 40s. When her parents tried to arrange a marriage for her, she waged a hunger strike—and won. Today, Ms. Kumari is paying her way through college by operating her own beekeeping business.

With the help of Going to School, a New Delhi organization that seeks to deter dropouts, and its Be! an Entrepreneur program, Anita Kumari smashed every expectation foisted upon her.

Around the world, efforts like Going to School have benefited from the support of the Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect program, which promotes education, health, and economic self-sufficiency for girls.

“Adolescent girls in poverty face dead ends and we gotta get to them before that happens, so that’s the inspiration for this work,” says Maria Eitel, president of the foundation, a grant-making arm of the athletic-wear company. Girl Effect began in 2008, when the Nike and NoVo foundations announced they would collaborate to help girls. NoVo is the foundation created by Peter Buffett, a son of the philanthropist Warren Buffett.

Ms. Eitel says Girl Effect was born out of her feeling that the foundation should tackle larger issues, and she settled on poverty. Through the advice of two board members—A. Michael Spence, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, and Jill Ker Conway, the former Smith College president—Ms. Eitel decided that girls would become a foundation priority.

The grant maker works with organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the United Nations Foundation to support programs that prevent child marriage, pregnancy, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and most important, put girls in charge of their own destinies. The foundation’s largest presence is in Ethiopia, where it supports Berhane Hewan, a project of the Population Council that has helped 11,000 girls avoid child marriage. It granted approximately $17-million to the program during its 2011 fiscal year.

One foundation grantee says that Nike has played a major role in putting girls at the forefront of international issues. Gannon Gillespie, director of external relations at Tostan, a Washington charity that holds educational workshops in human rights, health, and literacy in African communities, says that “the girls agenda is on the table in a way it didn’t used to be.”

And that is how Ms. Eitel hopes it remains. Girl Effect, she says, “brings to life this very simple but powerful idea [that] the least powerful person on the planet can transform it.”

At 13 years old her teachers contacted her father and told him about her great academic potential and asked him to support her during the year she took her national exams. Floviance earned a very high grade and was accepted into secondary school, but her father refused to pay for her and told her to get married instead. Floviance convinced him to give her another year to take the exams again and once more scored very highly. That year WISER opened and gave Floviance a full scholarship to secondary school.  Now about to start her third year at WISER, Floviance is one of the top performing girls.

View Duke Chronicle Article >

WISER believes that the best and most lasting social and economic change is only possible when girls are educated, self-confident, and economically autonomous. WISER is proud to be part of the movement, recognized by the Nobel committee, to give girls and women the power to engage in social change, work for peace, and improve the living conditions in their country.

Originally posted on February 5, 2010

Highlights from this red-letter day are featured in a new video. Watch it now:

February 1, 2010 dawned brightly on the WISER campus in Muhuru Bay when Principal Dorcas Oyugi and the five inaugural teachers welcomed the Class of 2013 to Day One of classes.

Accompanied by their families, friends, and community members, 30 excited students—many being the first person in their family to attend secondary school– arrived at sunrise. They quickly moved to their dormitory rooms and received their personalized school lockers filled with uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, and personal care products.

Since the opening ceremony a few weeks ago, Principal Oyugi and her teachers have been readying the classrooms and lessons in anticipation of the students’ arrival.

Kiswahili/Geography teacher Grace Messopir remarked, “This is a once in a lifetime moment where we, together with the students, have become pioneers toward change.”

WISER proudly has the first and only white boards in the classrooms and the highest ratio of microscopes per student in the science laboratory—one for every two students—in any secondary school in Nyanza Province.

Each WISER teacher serves as a house advisor to six students. The teachers chose the names of the houses to inspire the students as individuals and teams. The houses wisely bear the names Magnificent, Mirror, Vivacious, Integrity, and Savvy.

Andy Cunningham, WISER’s Executive Director and Co-Founder, exclaimed in an email to his fellow Co-Founders Dr. Sherryl Broverman and Dr. Rose Odhiambo, “As I watched each girl walk into her classroom and sit at her own desk on her own chair, I began to imagine the possibilities that await all of us. Could we be looking at the first female Kenyan president? Absolutely! Could there be the next African Nobel Peace Prize winner in our midst? Absolutely!”

WISER continues the commitment to support all of our students with a full scholarship, even as each new class enters our school until we enroll 120 girls.

To help us, please click on Donate Now.

Global Audience Welcomes First 30 WISER Scholars

Originally posted on January 8, 2010

Highlights from WISER’s Opening Ceremony on January 8 in Muhuru Bay, Kenya are featured in a new video. Watch it now:

Several thousand WISER supporters gathered on the WISER campus on January 8 to celebrate the Opening Ceremony and welcome 30 WISER Scholars in the first Class of 2013.

The students, ranging in age from 14 to 36 and having graduated from 11 primary schools throughout the region, will be on full scholarship—made possible through the generosity of WISER’s supporters. They will begin classes on February 1, lead by WISER’s inaugural Principal Dorcas Oyugi and her new team of five teachers.

Ceremony guests included the Honorable Kenyan Minister of Immigration along with distinguished representatives from WISER partners and supporters Johnson & Johnson, Duke University (home to WISER co-founders Sherryl Broverman and Andy Cunningham), UNICEF, Utawala Academy (led formerly by Dorcas Oyugi), Egerton University (alma mater of co-founder Rose Odihambo), and Melindo University.

WISER extends its heartfelt thanks to all our supporters around the world for helping us fulfill the dreams of girls, and indeed the entire community, of Muhuru Bay. Your continued support and enthusiasm inspire us, and we count on your help as we prepare for the day when 120 girls will attend WISER in 2013.

Originally posted January 6, 2010

This week WISER Co-founders Sherryl Broverman, Rose Odihambo, and Andy Cunningham along with many fellow WISER NGO Board Members welcome over 1,500 guests from Africa, Europe, and North America in celebration of the school’s opening and selection of the first 30 WISER students.

Days before the ceremony, the WISER selection committee, including new Principal Dorcas Oyugi, held interviews with 51 finalists as the last phase of the application process for the first class of students. Those 30 girls, all of whom will receive full sponsorship to attend WISER at absolutely no cost to them or their families, create the centerpiece of all the activities on January 8. They will begin their classes on February 1.

Pendo Simon Warioba, a student from Muhuru Bay finishing secondary school in another part of the province, declares, “As a girl child, we are very proud of what WISER has done to build a school to enlighten girls who have always been behind. In most communities, girls have been denied the right to education and exposed to early marriages. We are grateful for WISER. Let’s join hands together and support WISER!”

Ceremony attendees include many WISER partners and supporters from corporations, schools, and others NGOs including Johnson & Johnson, MassInsight, SolarAID, UNICEF, and The American School in Switzerland. Students and teachers from Muhuru Bay make up an important part of the ceremony audience to welcome a new private boarding school for girls to their community, along with the District Commissioner of the Kenyan Government and various embassy delegations.

The celebration features remarks by WISER’s co-founders and local, national, and international leaders in education and development as well as entertainment by school and church choirs and traditional dance by the village elders.

Elpalet Owino Ogwand, Chief of Southeast Muhuru Bay, comments in anticipation of WISER’s opening, “I have watched and participated as the project has touched all aspects of our lives in Muhuru in terms of health, economic, and education empowerment. WISER has changed my ways of all approaching issues in my work with the community.”

Building on an exciting new tradition of women and sports in Muhuru Bay, the celebration ends with a soccer match between women of Egerton University, Dr. Rose Odihambo’s alma mater and where she is on the faculty, and the women of Muhuru Bay.

Pictured above: WISER campus view with the Principal’s House, guesthouse, and research center.