Beads for Education
Current donation: $20,000
Donations to date: $196,000
BEADS for Education ("BEADS") plays an important role in the education of girls in the Maasai community of Kenya. Our donation will allow BEADS to teach 125 students at their Tembea Academy about climate-smart farming practices, expand their school farm, and provide climate education workshops for more than 7,000 people in Kajiado, the Amboseli National Park region, and the Maasai Mara.
Why They're Climate Smart
Deforestation is a major problem in Kenya, and the traditionally pastoral Maasai communities have had to embrace farming for their food security needs. Through their academy, BEADS provides 125 girls an education that encourages creative and critical thinking and returning everything that came from the earth back to the earth. Their school is completely solar powered and they grow all their own food (for 300 daily meals), practice no-till gardening, don't use pesticides, use greenhouses, and compost all their organic and paper waste.
During school breaks, each student volunteers to teach their families and communities how to generate higher yields and a more sustainable process by using less water, planting crops to attract and feed insects (along with pollinators), and reforesting the indigenous and medicinal plants that have been decimated. As part of this volunteer work, each student petitions the Kenyan parliament — and one student was so successful, she was invited to be a Yale Young African Scholar, selected to be an Ashoka Changemaker, and had her book on climate change and drought published and translated into four languages by Worldreader.
Why They Receive Our Continued Support
In 2024, BEADS added new solar panels to the school, built a lasting water solution to the ongoing drought (by buying a plot of land, drilling a well, and creating water storage facilities), helped communities build solar ovens, and organized 15 town cleanup days — including the Maasai Mara Game Reserve, the Amboseli National Park, and the Mombasa Coast — to teach the students about the detriments of plastic and how their actions impact the climate. In so doing, the students not only learned about wildlife and marine biology, but they also had a chance to experience the world like never before — as they had the opportunity to visit game parks and marvel at the ocean for the first time (and some learned how to swim!). Our ongoing donation will continue this great work.