The Shining Hope for Communities Model

Lucy lives in the largest slum in Africa: the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. At age six, Lucy began to trade sex for food to survive. Lucy’s father believed educating a girl was simply “not worth it.” At a young age, Lucy knew that as a poor, uneducated woman her life prospects were bleak. Lucy is just one of nearly half a million young women in Kibera denied education and made to suffer daily indignities. But in August of 2009, Lucy’s life and place in her community drastically changed—she became a student at The Kibera School for Girls.

Shining Hope for Communities combats inter-generational cycles of poverty and gender inequity by linking tuition-free schools for girls to essential social services for all. In our innovative, two-step model, women and girls are placed at the center of community development in places of extreme poverty. First, we build tuition-free schools for girls, which give the neediest and brightest girls the education they need to become the engines of economic prosperity and social change for their communities. The second step of our model provides the community-at-large with tangible benefits through integrated social services operating adjacent to the school. These social services include a community health clinic, clean toilet initiative, youth and community education, and economic development.  By investing in health and economic success through a school for girls, we demonstrate that benefitting women benefits the whole community, cultivating a community ethos that makes women respected members of society. The future of women in impoverished and patriarchal environments depends on concrete, integrated links between education and community elevation.

Creating a Unique Incentive Structure

Kennedy lived it: Survival is the first concern for those in extreme poverty, not gender equality. The biggest barrier to sending girls to school is not always gender discrimination, but resource priorities. Made to choose, families send their sons to school because they are viewed as ultimately more economically productive. Our model intertwines survival and gender equity: Attitudes do not just shift, people change based on perceptions of personal benefit. We build a lasting community incentive structure, interrupting the objective conditions of poverty that hold old attitudes in place. Free schooling makes educating girls not a question of resources, but of desire. With a clinic and other services at the school, parents want to access resources themselves, motivating them to educate their daughter. If these services are available to anyone, regardless of whether they have a child at the school, tangible personal gain is associated with the presence of a school for girls. This has a ripple effect in the community: Women are valued because they attract needed services. Our incentive system challenges current thought parameters, linking survival to gender equity.

There is a need for our model to extend beyond Kibera to change the daily realities of 600 million girls and women in developing communities around the globe.