Deep Research in Kenya: Laurel Schaffer & Anne Taupier

Staying in School: Lifunga students Maureen & Lucy, left, are cousins, and HIV orphans.

If you are a young girl in rural Siaya County, one of the poorest regions of East Africa, you are vulnerable by definition. Any further setback, a lost parent, a bad harvest, means that you are likely to leave school and reach 20-years old with several children, HIV, and an assurance of a short, impoverished life–for both you and your babies. If, on the other hand… you have social and financial support during the critical years of 13-18,  you have a chance at a productive, healthy life—and we know that healthy, productive women are bedrock to a healthy, productive society.

Like a lot of people…

Laurel Schaffer and Annie Taupier wanted to help.  But simply writing a check wasn’t sufficient for these two San Francisco women.  They got on a plane and traveled deep into rural Kenya. They went in order to understand what especially vulnerable teenage girls are going through in an already impoverished place.  This week, they are back in California, working on a fundraising plan that will empower young women to seek healthy, productive lives.

Laurel Schaffer, right, in Rural Ugenya District, Kenya

Laurel and Annie have been working in Kenya to research an innovative pilot project in supporting young girls to finish secondary school intact, healthy, ambitious, hard-working, and hopeful.  The proposed site of this pilot project is the Lifunga Girls Secondary School, which educates especially at-risk girls: orphaned, abused, abandoned.  The program would provide basic health insurance, intensive education in preventive health care and HIV avoidance, social support such as a school uniform and books allowance, and critical nutritional support.

Their research has not been shallow.

Laurel Schaffer wanted to know what home life was like for the girls.  She joined orphaned cousins Wendy and Lucy on their 14 kilometer-a-day walk to and from school.  Starting in the morning dark, walking in hostile conditions often on one meal a day, the girls turn up on time morning after morning, because they want a life denied most of their peers.  Laurel spent time in their homes, walked with them, ate with them, attended school with them.  We are obviously aware that this is not the same as living their lives, of experiencing their poverty from the inside out–but it is far more than most donors manage to do, and it informs Laurel’s work on behalf of Tiba Foundation with an unusual compassion and understanding.

Anne Taupier in Magombe Village, Kenya

Annie Taupier spent eight days in Ugenya District, bicycling to remote homes, walking rural trails, and doing due diligence with the school administrators. Her tremendous listening and analytical skills, along with her history of complex project management, are bringing Tiba Foundation a greater understanding of the possibilities and risks of this program than we would have been able to create ourselves.

Annie and Laurel are working on their final recommendations to Tiba Foundation about how to proceed with this project. They have already helped us to understand how this approach constitutes preventive health care, how useful an investment of each dollar it could be, since it will return to this community health, education, productivity, and wealth.

We are both grateful for and impressed by their unusual commitment and application to this project.  We believe that the hopeful young women of Siaya County, and indeed the entire community, will one day owe a good deal to Laurel and Annie’s pioneering work to kick start this program.