Dear Friends, This holiday season I am grateful for your continued generosity—over the past year your support has improved the quality of life for more than 49,000 children with disabilities! In the 15 months I’ve worked in Kenya as Kupenda’s program officer, I’ve seen your contributions turn despair into hope for hundreds of families. One…
Today, on is World AIDS Day, we remember that the HIV infection rate among people with disabilities is up to 3x as high as people without disabilities. This is due to the fact that people with disabilities are at a higher risk of violence, sexual abuse and a lack of access to legal protection,…
This week the world is celebrating International Orphans Day. At Kupenda, we join our colleagues in commemorating this special day by raising support for vulnerable young people but also by highlighting the need to prevent orphanhood in the first place. More than 70% of children with disabilities in our programs and millions more around the…
This year, on July 5, the Kupenda team celebrated an unexpected victory: we won the 7th Innovation Challenge of the Amplify program, a partnership between the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), IDEO.org, and OpenIDEO! This was exciting for several reasons: We were 1 of just 6 organizations to receive this grant among 489 applicants,…
Oripa Kwezuma is a 43-year-old Kenyan special education teacher and Special Olympics coach who works at Sir Ali Special School. For more than a decade, Kupenda has supported Ms. Kwezuma through job placement, salary support, special education trainings and individual counseling. On World Teacher’s Day (October 5), we’d like to share an interview we…
