“Put yourself into life and never lose your openness, your childish enthusiasm throughout the journey that is life, and things will come your way.” That was said by the Italian film director Federico Fellini decades ago, but sprung to my mind earlier today as I observed a classroom of first graders approaching a small box …
Christmas in July? Sure, a common idiom. New Year’s in June, however, has less of a ring to it. But, after my recent return from the field I saw and felt a new invigoration in our team—perhaps the sparked light for which Nuru was named. Despite the fact that as an organization we operate on …
We had a couple of questions from a donor this week about our third-party evaluations. We have done two of them officially. Here is a slightly edited version of how I put it to the donor: We have conducted two third-party evaluations, and the results of both can be obtained by emailing me at gabrielle.blocher@nuruinternational.org. …
This month, I have the privilege of introducing Andrew Chacha, the CED Program Leader. Andrew has been with the CED program for 2 ½ years now and has risen quickly from Field Officer to Program Leader because of his talent and passion for changing his community. It is an honor to be able to work …
So there’s some big news for our program. As some of you may know, we’ve been selling latrines and handwashing stations in the community for the past several months. Unfortunately, we did not meet our sales expectations for latrines and this led us to try other approaches (such as barrier analysis), and also to re-think …
As promised, here is an update on the Training of Trainers (ToT) we held with our new Field Managers (FM) in Leadership the past months. Six bright eyed recruits entered the Regional Training Center (RTC) in Keborui on the morning of April 9th and for five weeks they worked hard to learn and apply the …
Well, because we now actually have program indicators for all of the impact programs as well as leadership, the pressure is on. The Leadership program, which is a rather new program (comparatively) and shares the difficult attributes of being a slight challenge to explain and perhaps the most important program we have, brought up the …
I am in Palo Alto this week and last to meet with Jake and the rest of the Senior Leadership Team and to work with FT8, the newest group of folks who are heading to Kenya to work at the project site. This group consists of all new people, which is a first for us …
The past few weeks have been some busy ones with many discoveries and preparations for reinstating homevisits and scaling to two new divisions later this year. I’ve been working hard with Matt Lee and Lindsay Cope to make the necessary changes and additions to our programs, which we will blog about in in more detail …
I thought it would cool to share some more stories about the awesome staff that we are honored to work alongside here in Kenya. Today, I’d like to share the story of Elias Nyaitange, our program leader. I asked him how Nuru has changed his life, and here was his answer.
We have had a fantastic first term in the school year here in Isibania. We received a lot of praise and accolades from local school heads and the Education Ministry, but the praise that has meant the most has come from the students themselves. It is incredible to enter a classroom and have the children …
Commodities has two goals: to generate income for Nuru Kenya, and to support the work of the Health Program. The latter is more important than the former. The reason for this is the way in which our Health Program is structured, with the focus on teaching people to practice healthy behaviors. Commodities helps to make …
Nuru International focuses on developing the key leadership skills and critical thinking capacity of its leaders to build organizational sustainability. The ability of Nuru Kenya to support and reinvent itself is fundamental to adapt and scale operations. The challenge is to remain consistent, true, and focused on the program goal in each area. For agriculture, …
The abbreviation MPAT means Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool, developed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which is a UN specialized agency dedicated in rural poverty reduction. I was very excited when my former program manager, Jamie Frederick in 2011 informed me one beautiful morning that we would be using the tool to assess the …
I spent a couple of days this week creating a deck that draws upon a lot of the knowledge I gained from working at Booz Allen Hamilton and Booz & Company from 2005 through 2008. During that time I was lucky enough to work with a few program management experts like Eric Kronenberg. I learned …