History

School of Hope Foundation was founded in 2017 with the sole mission to raise funds for operations of St. Aloysius Gonzaga Secondary (St. Al’s) School in Nairobi, Kenya. St. Al’s provides free, high-quality, education for motivated students from Kibera informal settlement in Nairobi. The school was founded in 2004 and has recently finished its 20^th school year and graduated its 1000^th student.

In Kenya, high school is not free. Even public schools have fees for tuition, books and supplies. Families living in corrugated tin, one-room homes without running water and electricity in Kibera are concerned just for daily food, water and other necessities and are unable to send their children to high school. However, if students can get to high school and score a C+ or better on the Kenyan Certificate of Secondary Education exam when they graduate, they gain automatic admission to Kenyan universities with government scholarships. If they get a degree and a career, they can gain living wage employment and bring themselves and their families out of poverty. This is the core of our mission.

This past year, 61% of our students, scored high enough to get scholarships for college. If needed, St. Al’s provides some supplemental funding for food or housing. The other students are enrolled in license or certificate programs to gain marketable job skills. St. Al’s is ranked in the top 2% of high schools in Kenya and 16^th of Nairobi high schools.

Every year, School of Hope Foundation raises $650,000 from individual donors and small family foundations to operate the school. The mission of the school is to offer quality education in a caring environment to bright orphans and the needy youth of Kibera, through scholarships and enriched programs for character formation. St. Aloysius Gonzaga strives to be a center for excellence that provides holistic and transformative education rooted in Christian values. The school’s motto is “To Learn, To Love and To Serve” based on St. Ignatius Loyola’s saying “in all things, to love and serve.”

The Goal

The computers in the school computer labs are 10 years old and no longer adequate to meet the need. In order to improve access to technology for our students and better prepare them for college, we seek to purchase a smartboard for each of the nine classrooms and purchase 80 desktop computers for the computer labs, 20 laptops for classroom instruction, and two servers. These updates would greatly enhance curriculum delivery, independent learning, and student’s mastery of the technology.

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