Bikes4Girls Campaign

WHY THE CAMPAIGN:

Keep Minority Girls in School is a community organization that support minority girls who face profound marginalization and vulnerability due to culture, poverty and also lifestyle. These girls find it hard to complete their education and majority end up being married at an early age, a life that is quite challenging as well as continue living a circle of abject poverty throughout their lives.

The ethnic Minority Girls are doubly disadvantaged because of their gender and their ethnicity-that impact their ability to access education.

KEMAGS-Kenya promotes equal opportunities to access quality education by working directly with girls themselves.

WHAT IS CAMPAIGN:

Girls Bicycles Programme:
For girls living in remote areas in Kenya, getting to school can take hours by foot and walking alone in the early hours of the morning or late hours of the evening that put their safety at risk. About 85% of ethnic
minority girls learning in day schools walk 4 kilometres each way, and with a bicycle, they can get to
school faster and safer!

Getting creative

Reducing travel time doesn’t always have to mean building new schools—it can also mean other
creative strategies to leverage existing resources and make the journey to school easier, especially, for
girls who lived between two and six miles from school—that are too far to walk, but not too far to bike!

Breaking the barrier

Reducing travel time can be quite a cost-effective way to increase girls’ enrollment. A long walk
shouldn’t keep girls from an education. By providing girls with bicycles to reduce travel time, we can
break one of the first barriers to making education work for every girl.

WHAT THE FUNDS WILL BE USED FOR:

To buy 30 bicycles for girls to enable them reach school on time thus saving travel time and hence increasing enrollment and retention in school.

Impact:
One single bicycle (that cost US$ 70 only), can help a girl save upto 3 hours travel time to school every
day, 15 hours per week, 60 hours per month, 540 hours per year and 2,160 hours in four years of her
secondary education.