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

September 1st, 2011 in Events / News and Announcements
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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.

 

 

Catch ‘em while they are young – Precious Blood Secondary School Digital Camp

August 24th, 2011 in Events / News and Announcements / Patnerships
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This is a joint announcement with Akirachix about a collaborative effort on a 2 week digital camp for students from Precious Blood Secondary School, Riruta in Nairobi, Kenya. The camp began on 22nd August 2011 and will run till 2nd September 2011. This announcement is also cross posted on the Akirachix Blog.
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The Kuyu Project and Akirachix have embarked on a digital camp for a few girls from Precious Blood Secondary School Riruta. The training focuses on using digital technology and social media tools to effect social change. Precious Blood High School is one of the top performing girls’ secondary schools in Kenya. Akirachix had earlier visited Precious Blood to give a motivational talk and to encourage the girls to pursue careers in tech. The team of 10 girls aim to create a social media platform that will facilitate community service efforts among their peers – an idea they conceptualized on their own. The team members are:  Cynthia Gathaara, Ivy Lang’at, Joy Warimah, Faith Nyakundi, Kasyoka Mutunga, Brenda Wanja, Naomi Muthama, Julie Waithaka, Mary Njoki and Wangechi Mwangi. The Kuyu project will facilitate the girls’ training while Akirachix will hand hold the girls through the development phase and use the Akirachix network to bring their dream into a reality.One of the key objectives of Akirachix is mentorship. Akirachix plan to spread their wings to high schools to mentor girls and participate in their career days. This is aimed at opening their minds to consider tech as a career or at least think of ways that Tech can improve their day to day lives.The Kuyu Project on the other hand aims to trains African youth to fully utilize social media and other digital tools to effect social change in their communities and to achieve their goals and objectives. We believe this fuels the dreams and aspirations of these young minds which might one day lead to the innovations and technologically driven solutions that will change Africa and the world.

The key to successful implementation of technology in our society and effectively achieving our hope of becoming a technology powerhouse in not only Africa but the world involves growing a human resource base that can facilitate that development. One of the ways of getting the best and the brightest in to the field of technology is to expose them early to technology and its possibilities. Through this endeavor, Akirachix and The Kuyu Project are equipping the next generation of social and tech innovators.

We will post updates here on our blog as well as our social media streams. Like The Kuyu Project on Facebook or follow us on Twitter – @TheKuyuProject to get the updates.