NAIROBI, KENYA – It is 2:30 p.m. in Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum. The sun is vengefully hot, and foreheads are polka-dotted with sweat droplets.
A 5-foot-5-inch figure wearing a green and white checkered dress, matching socks and a red sweater approaches from the shade. With each step the shadowy figure takes, the bright sunshine reveals the face of a smiling young girl. She cradles a wooden box in her sturdy arms like a newborn.
Rebecca Apiyo, 14, is in her final year of primary school at Adventure Pride Centre, a nonformal school, or school run by a nongovernmental or community-based organization in an informal settlement like Kibera. She is the head prefect and also the student in charge of the Talking Box.
The Talking Box is a program started by Polycomdev, a local community-based organization in Kibera. It provides pupils an opportunity to share challenges that they are afraid to discuss so that adults can address them.
The children write down their concerns on pieces of paper and slip them into the sealed, dark mahogany box. Every two weeks, the Polycomdev team of volunteers collects the challenges that have been neatly folded and submitted to the boxes.
The team prepares quarterly reports for each school based on the contents of the notes. It then discusses the challenges mentioned by the students with their teachers. In serious cases, the volunteers directly seek out the students themselves to address the issues.
The team is also in the process of consolidating all the reports to submit to the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development at the end of the year.
Rebecca says that the Talking Box helps girls to voice their concerns because some of them don’t know how to approach their parents about their essential needs.
“Some girls only live with their fathers,” she says, “and he is male, and some find it hard to ask for things like sanitary towels. They think it is bad.”
But she encourages her peers to trust their parents and speak to them about their concerns, especially with the help of the Talking Box.
Rebecca’s mother, Francissa Apiyo, 46, says that all parents should know about the Talking Box project. She says that parents should change their approach to raising their children in order to make the home more conducive for children to voice their concerns.
She says this will have a positive effect on education. Once the children speak up about what bothers them, they can focus on their studies better.
“Children of today were born with their own wisdom,” she says. “You have to talk to them and reason with them.”
The Talking Box program strives to give young students, especially girls, a chance to voice their concerns in a less daunting platform. Concerns range from their families’ inability to pay school fees to revelations of abuse and neglect. Educators say the program is reducing school dropouts and improving academic performance for girls.
According to the Kenya Independent Schools Association, 40 percent of the 1.5 million residents of the Kibera slum are children.
Children from poor, urban neighborhoods are less likely to attend school, according to UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 2012 Report. Even in countries that offer free primary education, such as Kenya, ancillary costs such as school uniforms, classroom stationery or even exam fees make education an unaffordable cost for families in poor areas.
Girls especially face extra obstacles to education, from lack of sanitation facilities and sanitary napkins to teenage pregnancy, according to a 2008 report by the Centre for the Study of Adolescence.
Kennedy Oduol, principal of Adventure Pride Centre, says that the Talking Box program provides female students especially an opportunity to speak up about various challenges they face.
“Most of the girls were being molested at home,” he says, providing one example. “And at school, the teachers were harsh on them trying to complete the [education] syllabus.”
The school then addresses these challenges. For example, it forwarded the molestation cases to the Department of Children’s Services under the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development. In the process of voicing and addressing concerns, Oduol says the program has built the students’ self-esteem.
And it is not only the girls benefiting from the program, though it has been geared toward them.
George Miheso, 12, is also a student at Adventure Pride Centre. He seems dwarfed by his oversized uniform, and he is soft-spoken. But he has an intense stare. His eyes seem to speak for him.
“When I came to school, I was afraid to talk to others,” he says.
But once George was able to write down his concerns and submit them to the Talking Box, things changed. He teachers worked with him on his shyness, and he says he now feels more confident.
“I can now stand in front of the class and write answers on the blackboard,” George says enthusiastically.
Oduol says that boys have also used the program as a tool to help their families. For example, Danson Karime says he wrote notes about his sister’s and his neighbor’s needs for feminine products and signed their names to them because they were too shy to ask their parents.
Anyango says that the program has mostly targeted girls. But boys have also voiced interest in a similar program geared toward them, so she is working with other organizations with the capacity to develop something specifically for the boys.
Polycomdev introduced the Talking Box program in January 2011 and now runs it in 10 schools, nearly all of which are in Kibera. Jane Anyango, founder of Polycomdev and the Talking Box program, says that the experiences of her teenage niece compelled her to begin addressing issues facing girls. Her 13-year-old niece wasn’t able to talk to her freely about her dislike for the neglect she faced both before and after she began an intimate relationship with and married a middle-aged man.
From this experience, Anyango began to periodically invite girls in her neighborhood to discuss the things that challenged them. She soon saw that there was a stronger need to reach more girls.
“I felt like schools were the best place to reach girls,” she says. “Because they can talk more freely away from home.”
Every two weeks, a team of volunteers collects the boxes’ contents from each school. Some concerns are stationery and uniform requests from children whose parents can’t afford them.
“My family is poor and I need books and pencils for school,” reads one anonymous note. Please help me.”
Other notes cry of abuse and neglect.
“My father does inappropriate things to me,” reads another anonymous note. “When I do something wrong my father tells me to take all my clothes off and he beats me naked, and I am a 13 year old girl.”
Anyango and her team tried to trace the author of this note, but they were not able to reach her.
“These young girls need someone to talk to,” Anyango says. “They go through so much, and some parents are not understanding.”
Anyango acknowledges that some parents will never change.
“Unless the parent has God in their heart, I don't think they will change to make it easier to talk to their children,” she says.
But she hopes that the Talking Box initiative can help give these children voices.
Oduol says that school dropouts have decreased since the inception of the Talking Box program, although he didn’t have data to verify this trend. Oduol says that girls in his school start dropping out in the middle to upper classes, when most are between the ages of 11 and 15.
“Most are cheated by boys and end up pregnant,” Oduol says. “Others act as mothers at home.”
Oduol says these children must run their households while parents work outside the home to earn money to support the family. Oduol doesn’t have official statistics on the dropout rates in his school, but he says that there is a trend.
“It is a 10-percent reduction up to the end,” he says, meaning that 30 percent of girls drop out between fifth grade and eighth grade.
The Municipal Education Office is the government office in charge of monitoring the implementation of free primary education in schools at district level. Schools in Kibera slum fall under Lang’ata district, which is led by George Letema. The district doesn’t have dropout records, he says.
“Nonformal schools are required to bring their records, but they don’t,” Letema says.
Oduol remains optimistic that the Talking Box program has been reducing dropouts because it enables students to speak up about the challenges standing in their way of receiving an education. He says the initiative has also improved students’ openness in class discussions. This has improved the academic performances of especially the girls, whom the program targets.
Last year, one of his primary school students gained sponsorship for high school from CARE International Kenya for her academic achievement. Several female students scored highly on the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exams, which are scored out of 500 points.
“Last year, we had several girls scoring over 300 marks,” Oduol says with excitement.
