Stories
Betty Nyagoha will be buried today in her family lands near Lugari, a small town in western Kenya. Her passing, after being admitted to hospital in Nairobi with Covid-19, ends a 27-year journey in education for Nyagoha, who founded a school called Gatoto in the Mukuru Kwa Reuben area of Nairobi in 1994 and turned it into one of the best primary schools in Kenya.
She got there through her own grit and determination with the help of the teachers and community around the school. But it is also an Irish story.
Nyagoha impacted thousands of Irish people – from the students from universities across Ireland who volunteered in her school, to the fundraisers which took place across the country, to her friendships with Irish business people, and the support she received from the Irish state.
Nyagoha’s story is as inspiring as it is improbable. It involves overcoming obstacles, any one of which could have defeated her, but didn’t.
Born in 1969, Nyagoha grew up the youngest of ten children in rural Kenya, not far from the border with Uganda.
She grew up in poverty and her parents who were subsistence farmers struggled to come up with the school fees required to give her an education.
Over the years, Nyagoha shared the story of how she was raped as a child when walking through the fields near her home, and she said later this terrible experience gave her the fire required to stand up for children and give them a safe place in her school.
After she finished school, she got a job as an untrained teacher, but competition for such jobs was fierce. She found out her job wasn’t being renewed at about the same time she discovered she was pregnant. She decided to get married and started a small business selling maize and other goods in Nairobi where she moved with her husband in search of a better life.
During this time she heard about an informal primary school that was being started up in Mukuru Kwa Reuben, and successfully applied for and got the job as its first head teacher in 1994. The school started in a church with 370 children in one big room, but later it was given some wasteland area by the local chief to build its first tin-hut classrooms.
About 100,000 people lived in one-roomed corrugated iron shacks in the catchment area of the school, a heavily industrialised and polluted part of Nairobi.
The local community supported the school because they wanted their children to learn and get jobs in the factories in the area or travel to the wealthy suburbs of the city.
In 1995 Nyagoha met two Irish volunteers called Vanessa Liston – today the chief executive of cloud-based software firm CiviQ – and Colman Farrell, now head of programme development in The Innovation Academy in UCD, who were volunteers at the time in Irish charity Goal. Goal was funding the school but then was forced to withdraw support as it was going through its own financial difficulties at the time. Liston and Farrell returned to Kenya after their contracts ended and decided to work directly with Nyagoha to try and help her get the school off the ground.
An approach was made to an American Charity – Feed the Children and, closer to home, to Denis O’Brien.
In the late 1990s, O’Brien had become a successful entrepreneur from running Esat Telecom, a business he would sell in 2000 for €2.4 billion. O’Brien agreed to make a donation to the school – the beginning of many years of support.
With the support of Feed the Children and O’Brien – and under the leadership of Nyagoha as Head Teacher, along with a new talented deputy head Joseph Oloo, the school began to grow and develop – rising from lowest scoring in the area to one of the top-performing schools in the Embakasi Division. The school started a food programme and a range of extra-curricular activities. Soon teams of students from Gatoto amongst the poorest in Kenya were winning, local, regional and national prizes in music and sport – beating teams from the top schools in the country and living up to the Gatoto school motto of “We Strive to Shine”
After six or seven years of rapid growth, all looked well but the pressures were beginning to show. The school had expanded rapidly but without the time to build the internal financial, fundraising, planning, and people management processes. All seemed well but it was only months away from running out of money and the staff was feeling very uncertain about the future.
With a small grant from the Irish agency APSO, Farrell returned to Kenya with two friends from the US, Jennifer Brass and Ned Augenblick whom Farrell had met through the George Mitchell Scholarship Programme. Farrell, Brass, and Augenblick spent a year in Nairobi working to support Nyagoha and her team to lay the foundations for the next phase of expansion and development – setting up a website, starting annual plans and budgets, ensuring staff had proper contracts and starting on more ambitious fundraising campaigns
On his return home, Farrell teamed up with a young Irish charity called Suas which had been set up by a group of students in Trinity College Dublin. Michael King, today an assistant professor in Trinity, was the first chief executive of Suas, and he sent Elga Long, today an executive in Oracle, out to Nairobi to see if the school could support student volunteers from Suas as well as to determine what were its financial needs. Gary McDarby, then principal investigator with MediaLab Europe and today chief executive of XLR8 Solutions, also went out on this early trip to investigate the school’s needs for computers, along with Severine Reneaud, a teacher from France who lived in Dublin.
“I have to admit that when the project was present to me before I left for Kenya, I had serious doubts about its viability,” McDarby recalled last week. “The school was only just getting running water into its toilets when we were there so the idea of running a computer course really did seem a bit indulgent.”
McDarby could quickly see however the impact having access to computers and the internet was having on children and teachers in the school.
After he came back to Ireland, McDarby was involved in the early years of Camara Education, an award-winning charity which has worked with 55,000 teachers in Africa and enabled 3.5 million children to become digitally literate.
As her commitment to Gatoto grew so too did tensions between Nyagoha and her husband.
“I was told to choose between the school and the marriage,” Nyagoha recalled in 2016. Her husband wanted her to get a better-paid job than being a teacher. It required courage by Nyagoha to leave her husband, something that was unusual at the time in Kenya.
As the 2000s progressed Gatoto was educating over 1,000 children a year. Nyagoha was a brilliant fundraiser and the school went from being housed in tents to becoming modern with warm well-built classrooms, a library, computer room, proper toilets, and a football field. At nightfall, when the slums around it went dark, it had electricity allowing its children to stay studying allowing them to compete better to go on to secondary school. Nyagoha got there with the support of her local community as well as with funding from many other sources including Irish Aid, O’Brien, and Suas.
O’Brien was much more than just a financial supporter of Gatoto. He was also a mentor and friend to Nyagoha. He encouraged her and met her regularly over the years, both in Ireland and Kenya.
Farrell was another great mentor and friend. He helped her draw up the business plans required to get funding, and coached her as a leader.
Nyagoha in turn taught them both, as she did so many others, about resilience and the importance of never giving up.
Over the years, Nyagoha made several trips to Ireland. Her first trip was the first time she had ever been in a plane – but undaunted she arrived in Ireland and shared her story and that of Gatoto to audiences large and small, making friends, gaining supporters, and generally inspiring people with her openness, her courage, commitment and contagious sense of joy.
She later also travelled to the Netherlands and the US – making friends wherever she went. Betty had a remarkable ability to connect with people of all ages, from all backgrounds and all walks of life.
When asked why she did what she did – she said that she believed the children in Mukuru could be just as successful as the children from anywhere else.
She had a great ability to sense people’s pain – because she had felt such pain herself and a great ability to help people find joy and hope – just as she had done and worked to do every day in her own life and in the lives of those around her.
Gatoto went from being a marginal school to winning prizes. Nyagoha set up a scholarship programme to help its students go to secondary school and on to university.
Its pupils have become doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers, soldiers, and many other things. In 2021, it had 20 former students in universities in Kenya, a considerable achievement.
She registered Gatoto as a charity to help it fundraise and also expand its services providing scholarships up to university level as well as establishing a Community Outreach Programme which over the years since the school was founded had become better resourced.
In 2015 a former volunteer in the school, Jennifer Brass, today a Professor in Indiana University, and others set up a registered charity called American Friends of Gatoto to provide Gatoto with another funding stream.
It helped finance a new six classroom two-story building in the school to replace the last of its old rotting corrugated iron classrooms. This opened for use in January, to Nyagoha and the school’s delight.
Today the school employs over 40 teachers today and has well over 1,000 pupils. In a 2019 interview Nyagoha reflected on what drove her as Gatoto celebrated its quarter-century. “There is always hope at the end of the tunnel. That is what I have always told my children and I have seen them excel. The belief I had in them, 25 years ago, that has continued to grow, and I know there are better things to come.”
*****
I’ve known Betty Nyagoha since 2003. We have had many laughs and she changed my life irrevocably. My wife was a volunteer in her school in 2004, and it is unlikely we would have met otherwise. Around New Year’s in 2008, I was in Kenya visiting Nyagoha and other friends, when post its presidential election, violence broke out and over 1,000 people were killed and more than 500,000 displaced.
The school was protected by its community from wide-scale looting that took place during that time. I ended up covering the election for The Sunday Times and got an additional reporting by-line with one of journalism’s heroes Jon Swaine, best known for his reporting on Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s. In January 2009, I went back to the school on another reporting trip with the photographer Bryan Meade, whose photos accompany this article.
On a later occasion when I visited the school, Nyagoha asked me to sign the guest book. I noticed that O’Brien and a group of Irish business people had visited not long before me. My path would cross O’Brien’s again in the High Court a decade later, but that wasn’t the place to discuss mutual friends.
On a visit to Ireland, we visited Belfast together and she could relate to its historic difficulties as she had seen how tribalism had impacted her own country. The first time she saw the sea up close was in Ireland.
Betty Nyagoha was a strong and brave woman who stood up for children and gave them opportunities they would not otherwise have had. She leaves behind her beloved sons and daughter: O’Brien Shahenza, Lindsey Khasoha, and Dennis Simani. And she leaves behind Gatoto – a shining light.
