One of Our Team Heads to Kenya

People’s Postcode Lottery’s grants officer, Joe Ray, recently travelled to Kenya with members of the Dutch and Swedish Postcode Lottery teams. The visit was an international field trip to learn more about the culture and the state of poverty in some of Africa’s most deprived places.

People’s Postcode Lottery was recently involved in raising money to fund the opening and operation of a youth centre in the Lomahasha Community in Swaziland. We did this by each employee being given a tin and set a challenge to raise £12 each. The money gathered by this initiative will provide electricity in the centre for a year.

Back to Joe. During his 5 day tour, he saw a great number of things. He visited an initiative in Nairobi that works with young mothers to teach them business skills, allowing them to start their own businesses and work their way out of poverty. In the same day he took a trip to Kibera which is one of the biggest slums in the world. Here, Joe saw the work of an organisation called Simavi who run sanitation projects. According to Joe, the levels of poverty were unbelievable, not like anything we would see in the UK.

Joe had the once in a lifetime opportunity to visit the Masai Mara Tribe. Speaking of his visit there, Joe said: “We were out in rural Kenya visiting the Massai Mara tribe. The tribe met us on the road and began a dance ritual and led us to their village meeting place. The chief, elders, marons (young men), women and young girls were all in attendance. The purpose of the visit was to witness an alternative rite of passage for their young girls, as due to an intervention by AMREF, they are the first tribe in the whole of Kenya to have stopped the practice of female genital mutilation. It took around four years of working with all levels of the tribe to achieve this. The new rites of passage involved singing and then receiving a certificate. They then performed numerous dances and dramas for us.”

Joe also had the chance to visit the AMREF (African Medical and Research Foundation) health centre in Kibera. The health centre was the 1^st of its kind and is so vital for providing medical care in that area. After Joe’s visit to the health centre, he met the Prince of the Netherlands, who is an AMREF patron. HRH Prince of Orange was opening an e-learning service for doctors and health professionals.

Joe had an amazing time and really felt that he’d had his eyes opened to how differently other people live

People’s Postcode Lottery wants to do what it can to make the world a better place. But what we are able to do now is use the money raised by players of our charity lottery to fund amazing community projects and wonderful charities. If you would like to be one of the many that make this type of funding possible, then sign up to play today!

To read more on the visit, see AMREF‘s website.