‘Footsteps for Africa’ is a UK based charity that makes a very real difference to people living in desperately poor communities near Lake Victoria. It is run entirely voluntarily and every penny raised goes to fund its work in Kenya.
‘Footsteps’ provides Kenyan children with the opportunity to reach their potential as individuals and become healthy, educated, self-sufficient and valuable members of their communities.
We do this in a variety of ways:
by building schools, providing education materials, teaching support and water;
funding the provision of medical facilities to help prevent deaths from easily treatable illnesses such as diarrhoea and malaria as well as HIV/AIDs;
through a successful child sponsorship programme for particularly disadvantaged children; we invite individuals and families in the UK to join in a ‘long distance adoption’ programme;
through an annual voluntary programme (Rafiki) aimed at broadening the experience of the children: introducing sports, arts and fun and providing some understanding of the world outside their village.
Click to view a short video on Footsteps' work in Kenya
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it takes a village to raise a child ...
The longer we work on this amazing project that is Footsteps, the more important it feels to be focused; focused in terms of geographical scope as well as in terms of vision and expectation. We have such an impact within the communities in which we are working, that people know us and come and say hello when they see us in the streets. We have had the opportunity to see for ourselves what’s happening in these communities and we have come to believe that to build a school, dig a well, supply malaria nets or drugs, and then leave, is not enough; Kenya has plenty of crumbling schools and jobless young people, disused and broken windmills, and malaria nets being exchanged for other goods in the market place. This realisation has had a major impact on our approach to community development. At Footsteps we want to provide an holistic programme of support linking the provision of education and healthcare with the opportunity to work and re-invest in the future of the community. This may limit us to a smaller area of Kenya but we can make an enormous difference to the communities where we work.
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