A momentous year for The Walk Centre. The Walk Centre received 69 volunteers to help with the construction work of the new primary school and teaching at the pre-primary school. After 18 months of fundraising, The Walk Centre primary school was officially opened at the beginning of August. On the same weekend, The Big Bike Ride took place with five cyclists embarking on a 1,200km journey from Nakuru in Kenya to Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania with the aim of raising the remaining funds needed to complete the build.

By the end of 2017, The Walk Centre was supporting 439 students; 230 at The Walk Centre, 130 at Prison’s Primary (local government school), 75 at high schools and 4 at college.

In 2016, construction work began on the primary school. It was proposed that the school would have ten classrooms, an office, a kitchen and toilet block and the capacity to educate more than 300 children. During 2016, 35 people dedicated their time to volunteering at the school.

Alex had always dreamt of setting up his own primary school in order to reduce costs and give his students the care and quality of teaching provided at The Walk Centre. In 2015, this dream started to become reality when African Adventures Foundation and Chichester College committed to teaming together to fundraise £82,000 to construct a new primary school.

By 2014, volunteers had helped to construct and renovate five classrooms at The Walk Centre, to educate students from Baby Class up to Standard One. The introduction of a Standard One classroom was the latest development this year. This classroom was built so that children could continue their education for one more year at The Walk Centre and complete their first year of primary education. This was important for Alex and Patricia because once children finished at The Walk Centre, they would have to find places at local government primary schools and this comes with costs, to which many cannot afford.

This was a progressive year for The Walk Centre and African Adventures sent 50 volunteers to help out with building and teaching at the school. By 2013, The Walk Centre was educating approximately 200 students and student numbers were steadily increasing year on year.

Two years later, in 2009, African Adventures was born and the first group of volunteers travelled to volunteer in Nakuru and The Walk Centre, where they assisted with construction work and teaching.

This was the start of an exciting journey ahead and African Adventures has since partnered with over 25 projects in Kenya, Ghana and Zanzibar and has sent over 4,000 volunteers to assist with building and teaching at these projects.

In 2007, Dan Mew travelled to Kenya for the first time, where he volunteered for six weeks with a local, amateur football team. The team comprised of young men who lived primarily on the perimeter of Nakuru’s dumpsite. Before football training each day, Dan volunteered at The Walk Centre, where he met Alex. Dan also visited other community projects in the local area and met some inspirational leaders in the process. They had the motivation, compassion and knowledge in abundance to grow their respective projects; what they lacked was financial support.

His whole experience made him realise that he wanted to spend his professional life providing community projects like The Walk Centre with the financial and humanitarian support they need to grow, whilst offering people from the UK the same life-changing opportunity he had. From his time at The Walk Centre, Dan developed a partnership with Alex and left Kenya with food for thought.

The school soon grew to over 100 pupils and there was need to source a bigger plot of land to be able to accommodate the number of children. With help from supporters, enough funding was collected, and a new, more permanent site was located. In 2006, The Walk Centre was officially registered as a pre-primary school. By this time, the Centre was providing an education and feeding programme for 120 children.

In 2005, Alex and Patricia Maina started The Walk Centre, after witnessing cases of extreme poverty in their local area. Before The Walk Centre was set up, many children worked the town’s dumpsite, sourcing valuable materials which their families could recycle and sell in order to survive.

Alex and Patricia felt compelled to help and they rented a small plot of land where they initially invited 60 children to come for a place to receive a daily meal and basic education in Kiswahili, English and Mathematics.