Rossholme School, an independent boarding and day school for girls, was founded in 1888 in Weston super Mare and had moved out to East Brent on a temporary basis in 1940. Sadly, in 2005 the decision to close Rossholme had to be made BUT, thanks to the vision and determination of one special lady….

It was at the first 100Women Conference organised by the BBC in 2013 that I happened to meet the most extraordinary girl from Kenya. It was her first ever departure from Kenya, where she lives in the Mathare slum in Nairobi; we were staying in the same hotel so I invited her to come with me to Rossholme before she flew home.

I found out that she could take two pieces of luggage weighing up to 23kgs each. I still had a significant amount of brand new Rossholme uniforms which I gave to an ecstatic Joyce. And so the hint of a possibility of opening a school for slum children in Nairobi was born….

Joyce had been made to give up her schooling aged 13 in order to become the third wife of a much older man. Now 29, Joyce wants to give more children from her neighbourhood the opportunity to get the education for which she had to fight tooth and nail. It has been her ambition is to start a school to provide basic education for the children in the Mathare slum.

She had run away from that marriage after a week, prompting her parents, who had received two cows in payment from her husband, to disown her. She is the youngest of a family of 11 children, of whom just five survive, and the only one to have attended school. Two years in a children’s home in Nairobi and two years working as a maid did not deter her and now, living in the second largest slum in Africa, Joyce has, at last, achieved her ambition to become a teacher.

Having registered Rossholme Education Project, Joyce graduated this year and immediately put her meagre savings into renting a house to open Rossholme's Education Centre with 10 children from 8 mths to 4 yrs.

Now is the time for us to help…