Student Needs

MGEF scholarships include everything a student needs during the school year.  Some are required by the schools.  Mosquito nets and personal supplies are provided to ensure optimum conditions for each student's health and success.

Scholarships include:

• uniforms, which include skirts and blouses or dresses, shoes, underwear, socks, sweaters, and shoes
• a mattress, sheets, blankets, a trunk and lock, a towel, a cup plate and spoon, and a basin  for washing when they first report to school.

All secondary students are required to have:

• a Bible or Koran, a geometrical set, a Kiswahili and English Dictionary, a calculator, exercise books, and pencils.

In addition to the above requirements, students are provided personal supplies throughout the year, which include a toothbrush and toothpaste, bath soap, toilet paper, comb, laundry soap, shoe polish, sanitary pads for older girls. 

All of MGEF's students attend boarding schools, which eliminate some of the barriers to girls' education. Some students are enrolled in public boarding schools and some in private boarding schools, if considered the preferred option. MGEF pays room and board (and tuition if the student is enrolled in a private school), buys uniforms, and provides personal supplies to each student.

Boarding schools have many advantages that increase each student's chance of completing their education:

• Boarding schools provide structured study time, which is not possible at home as after school girls must help with herding goats and cattle, caring for younger siblings, and helping with meals until dark when there is no electricity to provide sufficient lighting for doing homework.
• Boarding schools provide health care, when the nearest health clinic to a girls' village could be as far as 20 kilometers away.
• Boarding schools provide a safe haven from family and peer pressures to get married.
• Boarding schools provide three healthful meals a day, where a child at home might only get one, and that one might consist only of tea and bread.
• Boarding schools prevent the security risk that a girl walking to school alone creates.

The cost of a scholarship varies with each school and with the level of education and the Kenya Shilling exchange rate, but on average the range of annual costs for primary school is from $265 - $640 and for secondary school from $375 to $470.  Post-secondary education cost from $1,000 to $2,000 per year.