EFF Rift Valley
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EFF-Rift Valley (formerly Kila Nafasi) EFF-Rift Valley specifically targets girls living in the Rift Valley region of Kenya, a part of the country where secondary school enrollment is already very low. The Rift Valley is rural and lacks infrastructure, which makes attending school difficult and even inconvenient. Most families in the Rift Valley cannot afford the annual fees required for secondary school, but the region also suffers a historical bias against the importance of education--particularly for girls.
Thus, EFF Rift Valley sponsors the secondary education of girls who show great academic promise in primary school. This program reaches girls from families that cannot afford secondary school for all their children and/or that do not support their daughter’s pursuit of higher education. Often when finances are scarce, a family will choose to educate their sons before their daughters. EFF is intervening in the most basic way to change these trends and biases against girls.
A secondary education gives girls an alternative to early marriage and child-bearing, and it helps widen girls' options beyond the taxing agricultural work and domestic duties that women in the region are often limited to. Our ultimate goal is to achieve gender parity in secondary school enrollment in the Rift Valley.
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