PA-MOJA scholarships are highly sought after in the communities around the Ol Pejeta Conservancy because unfortunately we do not have enough scholarships to give to all the deserving candidates. As such, there needs to be a fair way of distributing the scholarships. The first step in this process is to print and distribute the forms to all the community leaders. This may sound like it would be easy, however, the area around the conservancy is vast and the roads are not always the smoothest especially after the recent heavy rains.
As soon as the results of the grade 8 exams were released, the OPC team jumped into action. They made and perfected the scholarship forms, collated them for the communities and then started reaching out to all the local leaders, letting them know that we would be coming around on Tuesday.
The day started at 7am picking up the team and then setting out across the conservancy to provide forms to one leader who would share out forms to the three communities in the North. After retracing our steps through the conservancy, each leader was called and a plan established for how we would meet up. We found some close to their homes, others arrived to a set location on a motorbike or on foot. The whole process was so well organized that we never waited for more than a minute for a leader to arrive. The leaders were given the forms and an explanation of the timeline and then we were back on the road to the next location.
At the end of the day, 20 packages of forms were given out to 15 leaders. We traveled over 250km in a very tiring 11 hour journey. The leaders were all so happy to get the forms; one said that he had received 5 calls already that day from people wondering where the forms were. Another said that we could probably come back in an hour and find the forms all filled in and ready to go back!
This is the first, very important step in a long process of distributing scholarships for 2024 school year. The next stage is the short listing process that starts on December 11th.
