Malindi is situated about 120 km north of Mombasa just a little south of the equator. The district has a coastline of 155 kilometres, Tourism is a thriving business in Malindi. Beach hotels and other luxury hotels dot the town of Malindi. 

Majivuni School lies inland about 8 kilometres from the coast and access is via a very muddy narrow road through the countryside. In the rainy season the road can be impassable.

Majivuni has approximately 1150 children whose ages range from 5 to 16. Up until last year parents had to pay 60 pence per term for their children to attend school – which was a vast amount of money for the local people to find. With the new Government, which was elected last year, a law was passed to allow all people to attend school for free. This has meant that an already undersized/resourced school had even more children to educate.

The school is basic. There is NO electricity, no running water, except for 1 standpipe. Toilets are dug as longdrops. Classrooms consist of concrete buildings with tin roofs and a blackboard. The local prisoners at the prison located near the school carve the desks from trees. They are designed to seat 3/5 children depending on age and size.

The school does not provide any exercise books/pencils/rulers etc. They only provide well thumbed text books. There is no library – the school has approx 700 books, which we took out 3 years ago from the UK. Some children walk 6km each way to get to school. There are so many children that they sometimes have morning and afternoon school and change over at lunch time. The children have to walk. There are no cars. There is no school run. They live in mud huts in communities with communal wells/shops.  

We first became aware of Majivuni School when we were raising funds for our own children's school via the Parents Association. The issue we had was that we had raised so much money for our children, that it seemed obscene to spend it all on them. One of the other parents, Fiona Thompson, had lived in Kenya and felt that we could actively help a school in Kenya, not just with money but support in terms of setting up pen friends, etc. with children in the UK.

Over the past 5 years our fundraising efforts have built them a new 3 classroom block together with 4 toilets - which are long drops. In addition to this Stewart and I have visited the school on several occasions and I have to say that seeing 150 children in one cramped classroom makes you feel very humble in the context of our education system here in the UK.

3 years ago I orchestrated a trip to Majivuni school to take out used books for them to start up a library/reading scheme. We had a lot of support and British Airways helped us get the books over to Nairobi and Air Kenya helped us ship them to the coast. The trip was covered by local television over here and I was trained in taking footage for them, which resulted in an edited version for the news programmes in the South East. We also arranged for a teacher to work at the school for a week and teach the equivalent of our year 7 & 8.