String art that pays for uniforms and learning resources

Over two consecutive summer holidays, Tusome Kids has supported 15 learners, buying school uniforms and learning resources. Miriam Wanjiku started it. She is a student at Mpesa Foundation Academy.

The money comes from string art. Every year, she says, she creates art with her fellow teens at home. The art is made alongside those teenagers to keep them engaged, and it is sold to earn funds for the Tusome Kids programme. Her string art skills sit with entrepreneurial awareness she gained through the innovation and entrepreneurship session at school, and she joined the two programmes to "kill two birds with one move," she says.

“As a concerned global student, this became a point of concern, raising the need for intervention and urgent action, because we are losing the young people.”

Miriam Wanjiku

Home, she says, is a slum area in Kenya where education is a need not fully met because of limited financial support. Many students in her home county go to school, but a lack of learning resources limits the education they get. The same teens and children spend most of their time idling around the estates, she says, and she links that to rising crime and drug abuse among children under 18.

The programme is running. "With the initiative already running, a significant challenge has been fully driving the string art business," she says.