Soweto Youth Initiative

Our community-based organization is located in Kahawa Soweto, Nairobi.
It was founded in 1999 mainly aiming for young children who can’t join school due to poverty.
At the moment we have more than 500 kids starting from the age of 3 joining our organization frequently.
We are 12 local volunteers putting our time and passion into the project, many of us grew up in the organization and were taught to become strong adults.
Alcoholism and drug abuse is a big issue in our slum, so we are aiming to keep the youth busy, giving them a perspective and teaching the important and different skills to make them find out their talents.
From time to time there are professional teachers coming to teach them about different subjects like environmental studies, photography, life skills, english or computer science.
Along with that there are volunteers coming through Workaway who are providing the kids with different activities and teaching them basic computer skills.
At the moment we have four working computers maintained by one of us volunteers who is a technician.
In our office we have a small space that we call our computer lab, at night we close the organization and store our valuables in a shelf to keep them safe.
The program also has a bigger classroom which is being used for lessons and activities.
The goal of the computer classes is to give the younger ones an understanding on how to use a computer or a laptop, and strengthen everyone’s typing skills.
The older children are currently learning some basic coding.
For the young adults the computers give opportunity to learn about online jobs.