In Kenya, there are two rainy seasons a year. Farmers take advantage of this to plant two crops. When the rains are late in coming, farmers must rush to plant one crop and harvest before it’s time to plant the next. The rain brings life here in Kenya and when the long rains start, there …
After a month of preparation and training in the US and a month of transition in Kenya, I’m so excited to have finally taken over Nuru’s Healthcare program from Lindsay Cope. Lindsay did an amazing job training and mentoring the field officers and community health workers (CHWs), improving the effectiveness of their home visits and …
The Water Crisis in Poor Rural Communities When we think about water, we often picture a glass of clear water or a cartoon-like drawing of a blue lake or river. But, these images are far from reality. A more accurate picture would show dirt, scary looking bugs and poop. People living in remote rural areas …
I do my best thinking on the back of a boda. Each ride offers a magnified view into my surroundings, and induces thoughts that would never be provoked from a car or even on foot. It is a quickened examination of the vibrant reality that has become my life for the past 9 months. Despite …
I thought in this post that I would take some time to describe Nuru’s agriculture model and talk about some of the ideas behind why we have taken this approach. There are two main problems we are tackling through Nuru’s agriculture model: chronic hunger with a lack of an economic byields and access to fair …
Alasdair Cohen, the lead author of the MPAT, is coming to the project site to lead our evaluation in May! This is such exciting news! We are excited for a million reasons, but most notably we are glad that the Nuru site will be a test-bed for innovation in poverty evaluation. As I have mentioned …
So I’ve been on the ground here in Kenya for about 9 months now, and FT6 has arrived to start taking over for us. Since June, we’ve trained around 500 new farmers in the basics of WASH, tapped into a demand for handwashing stations, and started to train our staff on a participatory based WASH …
The time has come to transition to the new foundation team. The new team arrived a week and a half ago equipped with new ideas, fresh perspectives and diverse experience. The transition is providing all of us with an opportunity to step back and reflect on what has been accomplished and what remains to be …
Continued … The reason we weren’t comfortable doing that is that our definition, in the end and through that process, did not make any sense. Extreme poverty, according to that old system, meant a specific number of health centers, a community-wide maternal mortality rate, a community-wide under-five mortality rate, a specific average maize yield, a …
Last week the local Ministry of Health’s Nutrition Team officiated a CHW (Community Health Worker) training on IYCF. Training materials were developed in conjunction with Path, University Research Co., LLC, and UNICEF. Here is an account by one of our most astute Field Officers, Paul Mogosi. This will be the last Healthcare training Paul will …
‘Boot camp’ does not translate in Swahili. I’m trying to describe the next few months of training that our Field Officers will be going through to build on their skill as loan officers. I tell the team that it will be difficult, a nerdy kind of boot camp, and I hear confused murmuring. “Why is …
Nuru International is using innovative new technologies for mobile banking to increase access to basic financial services for rural households living in extreme poverty in Kuria, Kenya. We are working with Mifos cloud-based MIS and M-PESA mobile money transfer services to create a viable solution to some of the issues that persist in providing financial services in …
Thanks to Aerie and his idea that a small group of us who now constitute the “international” team should meet and talk to one another once a week about issues of importance to the Nuru International world, I got to engage in a riveting discussion today with four colleagues about exit criteria. It’s a tough …
So we’re in the middle of our second round of participatory-based Water and Sanitation Training with our WatSan staff. As I talked about in my other post, “Teaching Leaders How to Facilitate Discussions,” our Field Managers have been doing some mock village trainings (our Field Officers being the “village”) with the PHAST Curriculum (a participatory-based training) in …
This week, we presented the following overview of our programs to the Ministry of Education officials and are hoping to receive their approval within the coming week. With the Ministry of Education’s approval in hand, we can then begin communication with the head teachers, school management committees and parents. Once that is complete, we can …