Leap Forward with Chance for Childhood

Thousands of children in Kenya live or work on the streets. They can experience neglect, stigma, addiction and exploitation – and many of them drop out of primary school or don’t get any education. Many also get into conflict with the law. In fact, four in five children in Kenya who appear before the juvenile court are street-connected children, meaning they spend all or some of their time living or working on the streets.

The LEAP (Learning, Educating And Protecting) Forward initiative supports 60 school-aged children at the Kisumu Remand Home in Kenya who are missing out on education. The programme provides literacy and numeracy lessons to the children during their stay at the remand home. The goal is to prepare them for mainstream education. In addition to the children in the remand home, the project also supports more than 750 street-connected children enrolled in schools which are supported by Chance for Childhood and the organisation’s in-country partner, Kisumu Urban Apostolate Programmes (KUAP). In these schools, specialist Learning Support Assistants (LSAs) help these children with tasks such as reading the board or helping them to take notes, as well as assisting teachers to make their classrooms more inclusive.

The Leap Forward projects builds on the success of Leap Together, the second round of LEAP supported by Theirworld, which helped hundreds of street-connected children in mainstream schools with visible and hidden disabilities, such as dyslexia or hearing and visual impairment.