Rafiki Thabo Foundation
We Hug Them

Rafiki Thabo Foundation

Rafiki Thabo Foundation is a small international development charity based in Oxfordshire. Our vision is that young people, including those living with disabilities, will be empowered through education to enable them to reach their full potential and initiate positive change in their communities.

We work through local committees of volunteers in Kenya, Lesotho, and Uganda to identify the need for, and implement, a range of education projects. These include our scholarship programme, school meals programmes, school infrastructure development projects and removing barriers to education and wellbeing for children living with disabilities.

We currently support nearly 500 vulnerable children and adolescents through our scholarship programme. These are children who otherwise would not have the financial means to pay school fees and who instead would remain at home to help put food on the table, and if a girl, be married off far too young to lessen the burden on her family. Many are orphaned, many are living with disabilities. With an education these young lives are completely transformed, as they have the opportunity to fulfil their potential, secure well-paid jobs and lift themselves and their families out of poverty, contributing to the sustainable economic development of their local communities.

In Uganda alone, 5 million children never get an education: One year at secondary school costs an average of £350 per child. This is two-thirds of the annual average household income, so most families simply cannot afford it. In Lesotho many parents have no choice but to leave young children to fend for themselves at home while they travel to South Africa for work. This happened to our graduate Morake, who tells his story in this powerful film.

In cultures where the natural instinct for families is to educate boys in favour of girls, due to the perceived higher ability to earn better salaries and the relative ease with which daughters can be married off, we are very proud to share that more than 50% of our scholars are girls. As much as possible we encourage female scholars, as the impacts of educating girls are even stronger than for boys: ‘Girls with secondary education are likely to marry 4 years later, less likely to die in childbirth, likely to have an average of 2.2 fewer children, more likely to have healthier children and more likely to send their children to school’ (UNICEF, 2014).

Case study: Nancy is deaf and has a learning disability. Before she joined our scholarship programme, she was stuck at home doing housework as her parents could not afford to send her to school. They faced the heart-wrenching position of having to prioritise the education of her siblings without disabilities, as they stood a better chance of earning an income and supporting their family. With our support, Nancy attended a special school for the deaf and recently completed vocational training in hairdressing and beauty. We helped find her a salon space and funded the purchase of the equipment she needed to start her own business earlier this year and her salon is now up and running. She now has such a bright future ahead of her!

Our school meals programme, ‘Eat Well to Learn’, provides a free daily school meal to at least 70 of the poorest students at our link school in Uganda. For many this is their only daily nutritious meal. The school meal gives them the energy to concentrate at school and take on their 5-10 mile walk to and from school every day. It also acts as a magnet to keep them in school, as it is one less mouth for their parents to feed at home. One school meal costs 35p, for only £80 we can pay for a child to eat well for a whole year. Here is a short film about the importance of school meals.

“Rafiki Thabo …. don’t just worry about the children’s education but also about what they eat, and they provide thousands of free school meals for children who would otherwise go hungry.” Dame Prue Leith

We also enable education through our school infrastructure projects, by improving pupils’ learning environment. Projects include equipping classrooms, building teachers’ accommodation to ensure access to continued teaching for the students, electrification of school buildings, installation of solar panels, sustainable food sources such as crops, chicken coops and pig sties, and building dormitories. The latter ensures that the students can maximise their learning due to access to electricity and stay safely at school instead of being exposed to risk of abuse at home or attacks on their walk to and from school. In 2024 around 2,000 students at our partners schools in Kenya, Uganda and Lesotho are benefitting from this programme.

Through our fourth programme we work to reduce the barriers to education for children living with disabilities. Our partner organisations are the Autism Society of Kenya (ASK) and Dadashi Special Children’s Centre. We work with them to identify suitable projects which we fund and they implement. In addition to the focus on the children, we work with our partner organisations to empower their parents, most typically the mothers. ASK builds the capacity of parents/guardians and siblings of children with autism to manage the condition. Dadashi provides therapy sessions for children with developmental disabilities but also works to empower the mothers of the children receiving therapy by providing them with counselling, training them to provide therapy to the children themselves, and providing them with income generation skills. The centre also facilitates children being assessed and placed in schools that can meet their particular educational needs, many of whom go on to become Rafiki Thabo scholars. In 2023 around 1230 children and their families were supported via our work with our partner organisations in Kenya.

“I think Rafiki Thabo Foundation is simply incredible. The story of young Praise who lost her sight at 8 years old and whose father abandoned her as a result, leaving her without money to pay for school, touched my heart deeply. I dread to think what my own life would have been like had I grown up in Pakistan without the support of my family and the British education system. Rafiki Thabo Foundation makes sure that vulnerable young children like Praise can have the best possible start in life by enabling their access to education. I full heartedly support the work of Rafiki Thabo Foundation and I am proud to be their patron.” Amar Latif OBE, Rafiki Thabo patron.

Rafiki Thabo Foundation is a very lean and transparent organisation, with 3 part-time home-based staff and 6 trustees based in the UK. We implement our programmes with the dedicated support of our volunteer in-country committees. The committee members are all personally known to our UK team and hold significant roles in their local communities such as school headmaster and church leaders. As such they are well placed to receive, consider, and recommend applicants to our scholarship programme. They will also actively recommend to children that they apply to Rafiki Thabo, when they know the families have severe financial difficulties and the children have a genuine desire for an education and the opportunity to improve their future. Our programmes in Kenya are supported by two paid staff members, our Disability Programme Manager, Daina, and our Programme Support Officer, Meshack (who is a graduate of our scholarship programme)

You are very welcome to visit our website https://rafiki-foundation.org.uk/ where you will find more information about the charity, our work, our impact and our patrons England International Cerebral Palsy Footballer Harry Baker and blind TV presenter, adventurer and entrepreneur Amar Latif OBE. There’s also a selection of powerful case studies demonstrating the impact our work has on young lives, as well as videos from our scholars and graduates. You will find us in social media as @RafikiThabo, across Facebook, Instagram, Linked in and X (Twitter).