This Sunday(24th of February) we, a group of enthusiastic Exeter students, will be running through the streets of Exeter during the Exeter Charity 10K to raise awareness and fundraise for the development of our Enactus project. The project is based in the slums of Nakuru, Kenya, where unemployment, complete lack of sanitation and scarce availability of affordable food and water, are holding the community back. We aim to set up a social enterprise (a business that reinvests all its profits into supporting and enhancing the community) in the Kwa Murugi slum area outside of Nakuru, to give the community a chance to thrive and YOU can help us make this happen! The business will employ locals, giving them a steady income to provide for their family and a chance to gain work experience, which is hard to come by in this area. Furthermore, the business itself will have a positive impact as its purpose will be to ease some of the rough living conditions, using innovative and sustainable ways.

Our group is part of a much larger international student community; Enactus, that the last decades have made a huge impact in other equally disadvantaged communities through the power of social enterprise. One example of a very successful project, namely Enactus Exeter’s very own BioSmart, has constructed a furnace that utilize ‘Biochar’ as an environmentally friendly alternative to firewood. This intervention is making an impact to the citizens in Kadzanuni, a rural area outside of Mombasa, as the furnace relics the need for a min.3h walk for firewood, typically made by the women and children. The time released can instead be spent in education/farming the land/building up the community. We hope to follow in BioSmart’s footsteps, and give the people of Kwa Murugi a chance to develop their community in a sustainable way!

So far we have teamed up with a local charity, the Doxa project, that have been working to empower and enrich the Kwa Murugi community since 2010. Together with them, we’ve become familiar with their current situation and the challenges the people in the slum area are facing, individually and as a community. Moreover, we’re developing potentially life-changing interventions inspired by projects that have shown significant results in slum areas in different locations. However, to adapt the intervention to Kwa Murugi specifically, and make sure it has the largest positive impact it can have there, we aim to travel to Kwa Murugi. The purpose of the trip is to validate the assumptions we’ve made based on the information we have had at hand in the UK, increase our understanding of the community and to test our business prototype.

In advance: thank you for helping us make a difference for the people in Kwa Murugi! Every little (or big) contribution helps!

If you want to know more about who we are and who we are working with:

Biosmart: http://enactusuk.org/tiwala-1/

Enactus: http://enactusuk.org

The Doxa project: http://thedoxaproject.org