Last year was focused mostly on fine tuning our typical programming at Samburu Youth Education Fund (SYEF), getting another year under our belt with a sharpened version of business as usual in an environment of philanthropic and economic uncertainty. In addition, with our first cohort of scholarship recipients having completed secondary school nearly 10 years ago, we sought to better understand the trajectory of our recipients following high school and SYEF’s influence in their journey (see summary later in this report).

We continue to support 45-50 youth annually with full scholarships for secondary school, life skills, training, and facilitation of service projects in their communities. Our DIG entrepreneurship program supported three new entrepreneurial teams and added new businesses to the community. And we continued to support groups of women with sales of their beadwork online and a handful of community events.

SYEF is funded primarily by charitable giving from individuals, and the trends in philanthropy over the past few years are nerve-wracking for non-profit organizations everywhere: there are declines in the number of people who donate (bad news) but stability in overall amounts donated (good news). In other words, fewer people are giving, but they are giving more. Our gratitude for the donors who continue to give and have increased their donation amounts is immense, as they help us make up from the aftermath of the tumultuous Covid years. Hopefully we will soon see a recovery from three years of economic uncertainty, and a reversal of these trends as a result.