Mentoring lies at the heart of Hatua’s scholarship program. It evolved from its humble beginnings as Sunday afternoon sessions which tackled simple topics such as how to make good decisions into what it is today — a solid curriculum touching on global, career-relevant topics and issues.
Since January this year, Nancy Wairimu, has been spearheading Hatua’s Secondary Mentoring program. A few things have changed with the introduction of new covid prevention guidelines and recent improvements to Hatua’s mentoring curriculum.
Karibu Hatua, Nancy! Hatua is very lucky to have you with us. Tell us how the first few months in your new role have been.
My first few months have been exciting, busy, educating, challenging but most importantly, impactful. I feel like I’m doing more than just a job here.
What do you enjoy most about your new role?
I like the fact that I get to interact to interact with and mentor young people. I also feel proud when I get to see them change their attitude and behavior because of what we’re teaching them at Hatua.
Amina, one of Hatua’s secondary mentoring trainers, during a session at Mrima Primary School.
Tell us about the secondary mentoring curriculum. What’s new about it? What are some key differences between this year’s mentoring and the previous year’s sessions?
The secondary mentoring curriculum is usually divided into different themes for different classes. In the April curriculum, for Form One students, the theme was ‘Succeeding in High School’; Form Two students learned about “How to Make Good Decisions”; while Form Three students focused on “Preparing for KCSE”.
We now plan to reduce the student to facilitator ratio from 1:45 to 1:12 in order to improve the student engagement and learning outcomes of our mentoring program. With the Kenyan government’s new covid restrictions, this is especially important as we can carry on our in-person mentoring sessions without placing anyone at risk.
Are there any particular successes that you feel are worth mentioning?
Hatua’s April mentoring session was indeed a success. We managed to conduct mentoring in a creative way even though the country was facing covid-19 regulations that greatly hindered our ability to host large groups. We did this by sub-dividing our classes into smaller groups.
We also held a three day Career Fair in April where 67 professionals from Mombasa county attended as speakers. It was great to hear them talk about their careers with our students and seeing our students get excited about many new careers such as those in the maritime industry.
Finally, what new things are around the corner for Hatua’s secondary mentoring program?
I think Hatua’s mentoring program got off to a great start. This year’s curriculum was very interactive and students had a lot more fun with the role plays we incorporated. We now plan to engage external experts to help us revise our curriculum and pilot it out to our high school students. Hopefully, in the next two years with the help of these experts, we’ll have a much stronger curriculum that we can make open-source and accessible to other youth who need it.
Find out how you can support Hatua’s mentoring program by following this link.
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