Amani School for Refugees

Giving displaced children a quality education

Amani School for Refugees, a charity-based teacher training college and primary school in Kakuma, Kenya is run by a group of volunteers who were themselves refugees. The initiative was the result of a community effort to give children in the Kakuma refugee camp the education their teachers received.

Aiming to be something of a haven for refugee children who have endured considerable emotional and mental trauma, the school provides lessons in numeracy and equips illiterate students with the tools to read and write fluently.

Initiated by INVER Empowering Refugees, an organisation that works to nurture the resilience and wellbeing of refugees, the school has been in operation for over four years. At first, classes would begin in homes and eventually lessons were held in the two classrooms that INVER Empowering Refugees built to accommodate the needs of the staff and students. The organisation helps keep the school running through small donations that are used to buy course materials.

The school has 80 children from multiple nationalities who are currently attending remedial classes and they are also connected with international teachers to equip them with knowledge and skills centred on the UN Sustainable Development Goals to help them become global citizens.

If Amani School for Refugees were to win the World’s Best School Prize for Overcoming Adversity, it would use the prize money to obtain learning devices for its students and update its facilities so it can allow more children into its programme. It would also set up a secondary school for older children in the Kakuma refugee camp.