When children receive a RRBF scholarship to secondary school they become part of The Red Rubber Ball Family. A scholarship is more than just the money to pay for their school fees. We want each child to make the most of the opportunity that an education can offer.
So we try to stay in touch with as many sponsored students as we can once they leave school.
What does this mean in practice?
Contact
We aim to contact each student at least once each year. This can be a challenge as there are now 265 students who have completed school. Add to that the challenge brought about by infrequent Wi-fi access and when phones get lost or numbers changed.
So we now work with the Rise to Shine Education Foundation (RTSEF) who make local calls to the students so we can stay in contact.
These calls are partly to check in, find out what students are doing and assess if there’s anything more we can do to help.
We are clear that our financial focus is on secondary school scholarships. So we can’t fund university or college fees, or buy resources to set up a business. But there’s plenty that we can do ….
Care
The challenges our sponsored students face do not end once they finish school. Life remains challenging with money hard to come by, even for students who get a degree.
By staying in touch it shows that we care about the students and what happens to them. This can be re-assuring, knowing that they’re not alone and someone else is looking out for them.
One student, Hillary, recently wrote, “Thank you once again for being part of this journey, it means a lot to me”.
Whilst James commented at a recent workshop, “Thank you for your consistent concern. It goes a long way in encouraging us!”
Workshops
On a more practical level, we can provide students with additional information and help them learn new skills.
In May 2025 we ran two workshops for our alumni students. These one-day workshops in Kisumu and Nairobi were free for alumni students to attend. Thirty-one RRBF students attended the events, organised by RTSEF with local speakers covering:
- Academic Skills Development
- Career Development
- Personal Development – including financial literacy basics for young adults.
These sessions also provided an opportunity for students to share their experiences, challenges, and personal strategies with friends in a supportive atmosphere.
And the feedback was very positive:
Levy “I truly enjoyed the day, it was fun meeting fellow youths, sharing stories, and learning from each other. It was an amazing experience. Of all the workshops we’ve attended, this one truly stood out.
I’m especially grateful to [the speaker] for touching on every aspect a young person needs to stabilize their life. From what we need to do as students, to how we should approach our life goals, her message was powerful and inspiring”.
Chrismonica “I really enjoyed, it was marvellous. I learnt alot of things especially ways of investing, ways of hustling and how to manage and strategize on business, it was so powerful indeed 🙏🙏🙏👏”
Beatrice “I will not give up in any situation that comes along”.
Encourage
We also encourage our students – this is not something they experience locally, where feedback in school reports can be quite brutal, even for high performing students.
Our encouragement is to develop what we call the “Anything is Possible” mind-set and to build their own network of contacts like Rotary or Rotaract, where they can make new like-minded friends who might be able to introduce them to local opportunities.
Our network
And we can tap into our own network of contacts, which we are looking to develop all the time through Linked In, often leading to personal meetings when in Kenya.
We can ask these contacts to:
- Offer guidance on where to look or what to do next – recent examples have been a student with a degree in accountancy looking to further her career, and several looking to progress careers in health and medicine. We even managed set up a Zoom call for one student (an aspiring pilot) with Kenya Airways, and arrange an interview for another student at the Ministry of Education.
- Provide training – like through Seed of Hope Kenya which provides free or low-cost vocational training to young people so they can secure employment or set up their own business. One RRBF student recently completed their seven-week course in hospitality and has now moved on to an internship.
- Give internships – this young student didn’t have his own contacts as he sought to gain experience following his training course, but RRBF does know a hotel manager who was willing to offer a placement.
- Identify work – most students really want meaningful paid work, which is a significant challenge in an economy that is struggling. As some of our alumni students are finding work, we encourage them to ‘pay it forward’ and if they can, offer opportunities to other sponsored students. This is a very encouraging development.
Support
RRBF cannot pay tuition fees for university or college and sponsored students have continuously told us to focus on secondary education. But we can help with funding opportunities locally – like the HELB or TVET funding available from the government agency. This can though be unreliable, so RRBF has established contacts where we can take up a student’s case on their behalf.
And we can write a letter of support if a student needs one as part of the funding or university scholarship application.
Laptops
As life increasingly takes place online, most students have a need for a laptop for studies or work. RRBF is not able to provide these for all students but has been able to access some from the Turing Trust.
These are second-hand reconditioned laptops and so far we have been able to provide for 29 sponsored students.
So we are limited by the number we can take out whenever we visit Kenya, but every little helps.
Loans
And finally, while we cannot pay university or college fees, we can help out occasionally by offering emergency student loans.
The total fund is limited to around £1,000 in any year across all our students so this is only for hardship situations.
The loans are interest-free but repayable once the students begins to earn. That way we can offer any repayments received out to new students in need in future years.
So whilst our focus remains on the scholarships to those children in school, being part of the RRBF Family means our sponsored students are never forgotten.