Victoria Sheppard is so obsessed with equity, she considered getting a tattoo of the word. The Ottawa resident’s obsession got its birth in Kenya, where as a volunteer she discovered that secondary school isn’t free.
“I just don’t think it’s fair that your life and the course of your life gets pretty much predetermined by where you were born. It’s just not fair,” Sheppard says.
Sheppard says she combats the unfair world by helping to fill the education gap in a slum in Nairobi. With Kenyan partners, she founded the Canada-Mathare Education Trust (CMETrust) to provide secondary school scholarships to academic achievers from the Mathare Valley slum.
The Mathare Valley is a shanty town with over 800,000 residents, and is lined with corrugated steel shacks.
The slum lacks all opportunities, which creates a cycle of poverty, says Heather Arnold, a CMETrust board member.
The Trust takes a grassroots approach to development. They work with Kenyans to build capacity in Kenyan society through education, which will hopefully lead to policy changes.
“We are providing a temporary, interim solution. A broader systematic and institutional change needs to happen in Kenya. Secondary school needs to be accessible for all,” Sheppard says.
Five years ago, Sheppard was a Canadian International Development Agency intern at the United Nations Environmental Programme headquarters in Nairobi.
She says she became frustrated with her lack of exposure to local culture, so she began volunteering at a primary school in the Mathare Valley slum.
Before returning to Canada, she asked the volunteer teachers in Mathare what she could do from home to further education in the slum.
They suggested the creation of a foundation to provide secondary school scholarships for students from Mathare, and Sheppard says she agreed.
“I felt this need to stay connected to [Mathare] and keep giving back,” she says. “I couldn’t just walk away.”
CMETrust has three chapters: Ottawa, Toronto and Kitchener/Waterloo, Ont., which are made up of Sheppard’s friends, friends of friends, colleagues and strangers.
“Out of the woodwork, these wonderful people from different parts of my life came together to form CMETrust,” she says.
The Trust is run by a 13-member board and numerous volunteers. Sheppard says she is inspired by Trust volunteers.
“[Their commitment] re-instills my faith in humanity. I can’t believe how hard people will work for an organization they have no real personal connection to initially,” she says.
Currently, CMETrust is sponsoring 40 Mathare students to attend secondary boarding schools in western Kenya, Sheppard says.
To date, the program has provided 48 scholarships and produced eight secondary school graduates.
Scholarship money is raised primarily by hosting events and selling calendars of CMETrust scholars’ photography. Each scholarship costs around $600 per year.
Sheppard says she has found Canadians are extremely generous to the cause.
“It wasn’t that hard a sell, because I really believe that a lot of Canadians value education, and recognize the opportunities we have here,” she says.
The Trust has two Kenyan field agents, Benedict Kiage and Titus Kuria, working in Mathare. They work one-on-one with the scholars to find the best secondary schools suited to their strengths.
Sheppard says she met Kiage and Kuria while volunteering in Mathare.
“I trust those guys implicitly, based on years of working together,” she says.
Sheppard’s husband Charles Omondi, originally from Mathare, acts as a bridge to Kenya from Canada because of his understanding of both cultures, she says.
On Nov. 20, the Trust released its 2011 Mathare in Focus calendar.
The calendar was created by CMETrust scholars who used disposable cameras to capture life in the slum through their own eyes.
One picture is of two small children holding water jugs and looking for water. The caption under the photo, taken by Trust alumni, Elma Atieno Ojango, says, “I took this photo when it was school days, but these kids’ parents seemed not to understand what education is. . . . Parents have forgotten that education is the key to life.”
Sheppard says this project gives the children a voice.
“I’m struck by the sense of dignity, hope, spirit, inspiration for their community and forward looking [in the pictures],” she says.
CMETrust has radically altered life for the scholarship recipients, their families and community in the Mathare Valley Slum. The scholarships provide education, which grants opportunity for employment, decreases early pregnancies, and discourages the kids from joining slum gangs or the sex trade, Sheppard says.
Sheppard is very modest about her role in bringing hope to the slum and contribution to breaking the cycle of poverty there. She says the reason the program has prospered is because the idea came from the Mathare community itself.
Each year, a board member visits the slum to remain accountable to the scholars, Mathare community, and Canadian supporters, Sheppard says.
This December, it’s Sheppard’s turn to visit Mathare. It has been three years since her last trip to Kenya. Her eyes brightened as she spoke about her return trip.
“I’m told I’m going to be overwhelmed by how important CMETrust is to the community, how much it inspires primary students to work hard, and how much it gives parents hope,” she says.
The scholars return to the slum three times a year. During these visits the Trust hires various local education facilitators to run education sessions for the scholars, such as sexual/reproductive health seminars. These seminars are extremely important because they keep the children focused on their education, Sheppard says.
Graduates from the Trust’s program often return to the slum to volunteer at the education sessions. “You start to see this pay-it-forward momentum,” Sheppard says.
Sheppard says the most important lesson she has learned about the developing world is that beggars can be choosers, and the children are creating their own futures by pursuing education with a little help from the Trust.
“They aren’t charity cases. They have so much potential and a right to go to high school, so we’re just helping them access it,” she says.