Alabaster in
Kenya
Endonyolasho, Kajiado County
Healthy Communities
An 8-hour drive from Nairobi, the beautiful community of Endonyolasho sits at the base of a series of hills, bordering the Kenya-Tanzania border. Here the Maasai tribe have been raising families for generations, keeping livestock, sending their children to school and traveling on foot for close to 15 hours to access medical care. In partnership with Girl Child Network, Alabaster began serving in Endonyolasho in 2012, working closely with elders and key community stakeholders.
In 2015, Alabaster launched the community’s first-ever health center, the Endonyolasho Dispensary, which now provides healthcare and essential medications to the Endonyolasho community and multiple communities in the surrounding area, impacting over 7000 people.
In 2022, at the request of the community, Alabaster launched the Endonyolasho Maternity Wing, creating a safe place for mothers to give birth and a new expanded clinic for childhood immunizations and pediatric care. The community of Endonyolasho is extremely remote, set in the middle of semi-arid lands prone to drought. And yet the community is no longer forgotten, recognized by the government as a fully-incorporated village, now hosting a thriving primary school, health center, maternity wing, health worker staff house, and multiple water storage units.
Raising up the Next Generation
Alabaster’s first connection to Endonyolasho was the Endonyolaso Primary School, with 400-600 students, ages 2-15. We were always struck by the community’s commitment to education and amazed to see some children walking 4-6 hours one-way from their homes to school. In 2019, Alabaster launched the community’s first-ever library, the Endonyolasho Community Library, providing a child-friendly space for reading, studying and creative learning, even after school hours. The library also serves as an adult learning center, providing reading materials for both students and community members
Lolupe, Turkana County
Women are the Future
Turkana County covers a huge expanse of northwestern-most Kenya. If you visit, you might observe that the region is dry, and sparsely populated, and that its people live with very little. But in the midst of hardship and some of the highest annual temperatures worldwide, there is a deep resilience and determination in the people of Turkana and particularly in the community of Lolupe, where Alabaster has been serving since 2018.
Alabaster’s focus has been partnering with an incredible women’s group in Lolupe who have joined together to sell their crafts, learn business skills and address the needs of their community and families. In 2020, Alabaster launched the Lolupe Women’s Business and Training Center to provide a women-friendly safe place for the women to gather, train and carry out their businesses. In 2022, we launched the Arise and Shine crafts collection featuring handmade ornaments created by the Lolupe women, which were sold in the US and in turn provided them with the means to launch their first-ever restaurant, housed within the business center. This women-led business is now thriving, enabling the women to prepare meals for their families and send their children to school.
Enset Food Security Initiative in Kenya
Alabaster is working with our partners, Girl Child Network and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) in Kenya to collaborate with our Ethiopia partners to understand the role of Enset as a food security crop in the wider East Africa region, particularly in the semi-arid and arid lands impacted by drought. JKUAT has successfully grown cultivated Enset strains transferred from Ethiopia under greenhouse conditions and has begun advanced tissue culture experiments to mass replicate disease-free Enset seedlings to then share this valuable data with Ethiopian counterparts for dissemination to farmers. In addition, those seedlings will be used for drought tolerance testing to optimize Enset for growth in dry and hot conditions so farmers experiencing climate-change-fueled food insecurity may be able to add Enset to their farms as a new climate-smart crop.
