Kakenya’s Dream

Founded in 2008 by Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya, Kakenya’s Dream began as a primary education boarding school serving 30 rural Maasai girls in Narok County, Kenya. A secondary education boarding school opened in 2018 with a class of 18. Today, Kakenya’s Dream is a robust nonprofit organization supporting girls with high-quality education, community-based health care, and leadership programs.

Kakenya Ntaiya grew up in the Maasai village of Enoosaen in southwestern Kenya. After surviving female genital mutilation (FGM), narrowly avoiding child marriage, and negotiating with her father and village elders to stay in school, she became the first woman from her village to go to the United States for higher education, attending Randolph College in Virginia. She went on to receive a PhD in education from the University of Pittsburgh before returning home, determined to provide a pathway to education and empowerment for every girl in her community and beyond.

“FGM is practiced as a rite of passage that is believed to prepare girls for womanhood and marriage. Once marriage has been arranged (for me, that was at just five years old) and we have undergone FGM, our schooling ends because we’re expected to start families and become homemakers. Education for girls was only seen as a tool to socialize us for marriage.”

– Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya

Kakenya’s two full-support girls’ boarding schools in the remote Maasai villages of Enoosaen and Isampin are called the Kakenya Centers for Excellence (KCE I is the primary school, and KCE II is the secondary school). They provide high-quality education to the most vulnerable girls in rural Kenya.

When students graduate from each school, they enter the Network for Excellence program, which supports them as they make their critical transitions to high school and college, respectively. Through the network, girls receive college and career guidance, scholarships and financial aid, tutoring, and social support so that they are set up for success in adulthood. Over 1,000 girls have attended the two boarding schools, and over 600 of them have received financial and other types of support in their transitions to high school and college.

In the county Kakenya’s Dream serves, four in five women are illiterate; only 17% of girls complete primary school and only 11% finish secondary school. Remarkably, 100% of Kakenya’s Dream primary students go on to secondary school, and 94% graduate from high school. In 2022, the organization celebrated the college graduations of its first-ever cohort of students. To date, 113 young women who attended school at the Centers for Excellence have graduated from college.

In addition, every one of the students at the Kakenya Centers for Excellence self-report having avoided FGM and child marriage. By contrast, 56% of women in Kenya who have no education have undergone FGM, and a quarter of women across all educational backgrounds are married by age 18.

Kakenya’s Dream provides its students, as well as boys and girls in partner schools across rural Kenya, with comprehensive sex education, information about the dangers of FGM and child marriage, knowledge of their legal rights, and life skills training. The Jijue Health and Leadership Training Program delivers weekly after-school workshops for students in grades 5–7 at over 200 schools in Narok County. The program has trained over 35,000 girls and boys to recognize and stand up for their rights and to develop public speaking and other leadership skills.

In 2024, Kakenya’s Dream opened the community’s first and only youth-friendly health and wellness clinic. The clinic serves about 1,600 patients a month with primary and preventive health care, mental health support and counseling, stigma-free sexual and reproductive health care, and services for those experiencing gender-based violence.

Learn more about this inspiring Global Partner organization at kakenyasdream.org!

Contact Hannah Evans: hevans@popconnect.org

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