The project began in 2016 with the founding of Every Girl Is Important, a nonprofit that aims to educate and empower young girls in Kenya who struggle to obtain a secondary education.

“One of the biggest challenges for the girls in Kenya is that [many]do not have access to high school … they either have to go to work or get married at a young age,” said Diane Rodríguez, Ph.D., the organization’s co-director and professor in curriculum and teaching at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education. “When women are educated, there are more leaders and more opportunities in those communities.”

The Fundraising Journey 

By spring of 2019, Every Girl Is Important had raised nearly $80,000 to build the new boarding school. Donations continued to come in, including a $10,000 gift from Arthur McEwen, FCRH ’55, a retired vice president of human resources at UPS, but they didn’t close the final gap. Then this past winter, Rodríguez’s partner and EGII co-director in Kenya, Sister Veronica Rop, spoke about their project at Boston College, where she was then a visiting fellow. Sitting in the audience was James Keenan, S.J., vice provost for global engagement and then the director of the Gabelli Presidential Scholars Program at Boston College. Sister Veronica’s presentation inspired Father Keenan to speak with the Gabelli Foundation, which donated the $25,000 needed to complete the first stage of the boarding school. (The Gabelli Foundation is chaired by investor Mario Gabelli, an alumnus and major donor to Fordham for whom Fordham’s business school is named.) 

“I think that what inspired [Father Keenan] was the good of the idea of educating girls in rural Kenya and giving them an opportunity to succeed, led by Kenyans and with Kenyans,” Rodríguez said, speaking in a phone call from North Carolina. 

Since the start of the new millennium, Kenya has improved gender parity in primary and secondary education enrollment, but more than half of secondary school-age girls are still not enrolled in schools, according to the latest data from the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 

Giving Back to a Global Society Through GSE 

Fordham has been involved with EGII’s efforts in Kenya for several years. In 2019, Rodríguez and six students from the Graduate School of Education traveled to Eldoret, a rural town in Kenya, where they mentored underprivileged girls and learned how to become more culturally sensitive educators. One of the six GSE students, Diana Baca, documented their experience in an eleven-minute YouTube video. 

The boarding school’s construction was set to begin in April, and a new group of students in Rodríguez’s inaugural three-credit elective, Cross Cultural and Educational Perspectives of Communities of Learning, were scheduled to travel with Rodríguez to Kenya this spring to assist with the construction process. But when the pandemic began in March, all plans were put on hold. 

The novel coronavirus has left Kenya relatively unscathed, compared to other countries like the U.S., according to a recent NPR story. However, it has left many girls more vulnerable to unwanted pregnancies amid the pandemic lockdown. Rodríguez said she hopes her Fordham students can travel to Eldoret in fall 2021 at the latest. 

“[My students are] seeing the opportunities that they have and how can they give back in a global society,” Rodríguez said in a Fordham Zoom presentation on the initiative on Oct. 16. “Giving back not only at home, but giving back to empowering other girls around the world.” 

The families were hoping to enroll their children in a new high school for disadvantaged Kenyan girls that Rodriguez has been raising money to build.

During the visit, a single mother told Rodriguez that she was recently faced with a tough decision: As she could only afford one tuition, which one of her four teenage girls would she send to school?

“She chose the eldest girl, but the second girl was also a brilliant kid,” said Rodriguez. “When the mom said that, the other girl started crying hysterically and ran away, because she wanted to go to school, too.”

Rodriguez said the experience made her realize how strained the education system is in rural parts of Kenya.

“There are many opportunities for girls to go to elementary school, but [not]many opportunities for girls to pursue a high school education, especially if they’re poor,” Rodriguez said.

In some cases, a girl as old as 16 will remain in elementary school because there are no other options for schooling.

The nuns from the Assumption Sisters of Eldoret, acquired land on which to build a school for high school girls. The project is already registered with the Kenyan government. Rodriguez started an Every Girl Is Important campaign to build the secondary boarding school.

Because many of the girls live far away from the site and can’t afford transportation to get there every day, Rodriguez, who will be serving as the project’s director, said arrangements are being made to house them on school grounds.

If all goes well, Rodriguez hopes to construct four classrooms and a dorm this fall. She said it would take about three months to build the boarding school, which is expected to be opened in January 2018.

“For many of these girls, this is their only hope to change their lives,” said Rodriguez, who explained that Kenyan girls face the obstacles of gender discrimination, abuse, high levels of HIV/AIDS, child labor, and child marriages. “Their parents cannot afford to send them to high school, so that’s often the end of schooling for the girls.”

Documenting the struggle  

In partnership with GSE, Rodriguez has produced a documentary narrated by Harvard scholar, critic, and producer Henry Louis Gates Jr. to bring attention to Every Girl Is Important, a 5013c organization she started to help build the school.

The 20-minute documentary features interviews with some of the girls who want to attend high school. Rodriguez said the goal is to present their challenges and show how the Every Girl Is Important project seeks to improve their prospects for the future.

“If you listen to every girl that we interviewed in the documentary, they say that they want to come back and help their family and their community [when they’re done with school],” she said. “They want to be nurses, doctors, engineers, and lawyers.”

Tackling barriers to education 

According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, at least 1 million Kenyan children are denied the chance to attend school.  In 2008, almost all children in Nairobi from well-to-do households had been to school. Some 55 percent of poor girls living in the North Eastern part of the country had never been to school, compared to 43 percent of poor boys, according to the report.

With help from a Fordham Faculty Fellowship, Rodriguez will be training East African educators during the fall semester of 2017. She said she hopes to learn more about the academic hurdles facing the Kenyan community.

“[This]  would not only help train educators in Kenya in the areas of bilingualism and inclusion of individuals with disabilities, but it would also inform the research on how language and culture influence the formation of teacher identity,” she said.

As part of the fellowship, Rodriguez said she will also be helping to prepare, plan, and implement a program of study for the Eldoret boarding school. She seeks to create a “solid and rigorous academic curriculum” that incorporates technology, and prepares the girls for college.

“I want girls to have opportunities to excel in life,” she said.