Girls Trip Tours launches scholarship program in Kibera, Kenya

In September I led a tour to Kenya as a part of Girls Trip Tours' group travel experience. We toured Nairobi's majestic wildlife, met influential women in the Silicon Savannah - Kenya's tech/innovation hub, and moved on to Lamu, East Africa's best preserved Swahili settlement on the Kenyan coast for some rest and relaxation.

While in Nairobi, as on every Girls Trip, we mentored a cohort of young women. This time, our class was made up of 14 to 18 year old students from Kibera, Africa's largest slum. We shuttled the students to the Giraffe Center, one of Nairobi's main attractions for a morning of education on wildlife conservation and the environment. They also got to meet and feed the resident giraffes including their favorite Daisy who is known to not like children. Ironically, the girls enjoyed her sass and antics.

After the giraffe center, we moved on to a beautiful retreat center where a female coding academy is hosted. We spent the rest of the day on the property listening to career talks by established young Kenyan women, using design thinking frameworks to ideate around solutions for generational poverty, violence against women, and lack of access to female hygiene products - girls' top three daily challenges.

To help with one of their top challenges, I gave out scholarships to three of the girls in attendance: one was on her way to university and the other two were entering high school. It was such an amazing moment. All day they had been confused and shocked to learn that a group of women would travel thousands of miles (a 20-hour flight?!) across the world on a plane to meet them, spend time with them, and listen to them. In that moment, it clicked for the new Girls MAP scholars: we came because we cared. We cared because we saw ourselves in them. They gave me the tightest and quickest hugs ever - full of gratitude, but also afraid to be too forward. And one whispered in the highest pitched hush tone "I love you. Thank you."

I told them that the scholarships had been provided by myself and two women in America who believed in their potential and wanted them to focus on their studies without worrying about finances. Again, the look of confusion and shock appeared on their faces. There were more women who cared. Women who were not present on the day, but somewhere on the other side of the world - distant, yet vivid in their imagination.

I hope if they had learned anything during the session, they took away, not just by my opening words, but through our interaction that if you put something out into the world, the universe will conspire to help you reach your goal. I say this because a young lady named Lavet Adhiambo wrote to me a year before the trip asking me to come to Kenya and to bring my program to her girls. That simple request led me to them and gave them access to the Girls Trip Tours experience of which they were in such awe.

Read more about our mentoring program or join us as a mentor on one of our travel experiences.

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