AZMA – Girls from Precious Blood School Creating A Social Network For Community Service

Last week, in a joint statement with AkiraChix, we announced a training for a couple of girls from Precious Blood Secondary School, Riruta. We’ve been undertaking the training since 22nd August  and we will be winding up the training on Friday 2nd September 2011.

The genesis of the training was when a couple of girls from AkiraChix visited Precious Blood School to give a talk on the opportunities for women in technology. A couple of girls who were inspired by the talk reached out to them with an idea to build a social network that would help them consolidate community service efforts among high schoolers in Kenya.

This has been the basis for the digital camp we’ve held for the past two weeks.

We spent the entire last week hashing out the details of the impact they wanted to create as well as creating a narrative that embodied their mission and passion for the project. In the past week, we’ve been setting up their technical infrastructure as well as their social profile and getting their social network in place. We’ve also focused on strengthening their operational activities.

The result of these efforts is AZMA the title of the social network (and by extension, the organization) that the girls from Precious Blood have poured their effort into.

The "AZMA" logo design concept

AZMA as a social network will allow Kenyan High Schoolers to register and define their role/identity in one or more of three major ways: Mentorship, Outreach and The Green Movement. These three pillars are the objectives of the AZMA social network. The mentorship objective seeks to pair high schoolers with older mentors or with younger mentees. It will also act as a knowledge repository on different topics. The Outreach objective is directly linked with rallying people behind community outreach events such as visiting a childrens’ home, cleaning up an area or even volunteering in different organizations. The Green Movement objective seeks to motivate students to participate in environmental conservation efforts.

The Kuyu Project takes pride in seeing the girls learn the value of technology and utilize it in social change processes…a principle belief in our organization as well.

The girls will launch their website really soon. We will post an update on this in the coming days as we wind up the digital camp.