Two young Central Iowans have been helping to fund schools in Kenya since they were teenagers. Hopeful Africa started as an after-school club is now a serious nonprofit.
Moses Bomett laid out a rough outline for what would become Hopeful Africa during an eight-minute speech he delivered at the State Speech Contest when he was a student at Valley High School in West Des Moines. He refined his plan for supporting quality education in Africa during a later speech before five-thousand young people given when he was just 16.
“Africans need to be educated so they can come with the solutions to solve the problems; poverty, disease, all of these problems that are affecting Africa need to be solved by the people in Africa so they can come with homegrown solutions, solutions that directly apply to Africa,” he tells the gathering in Salt Lake City.
Bomett was born in the U.S., but between the ages of two and 14, he lived in Kenya. He says he saw the odds stacked against many of his fellow students in East Africa.
“I just felt like, some people are going to be able to make it and some people were not going to be able to make it," he says. "Some of the people I knew would go to school some people would never go to school, some people would have opportunities some people would never have opportunities because that’s the only thing I knew, the world around me.”
These thoughts were rolling around Bomett’s head while he was recruiting classmates at Valley for a club that would raise money for schools in Kenya. One of the club members was Kyle Upchurch, who didn’t find it odd a bunch of teenagers in a Des Moines suburb would take on such a huge project.
“I think youth get overlooked too often in their ability to make change and their desire to make change, especially when you’re talking about something international," Upchurch says. "I think we struck a nerve and it convinced us we want to make this a thing, we want to make it big.”
Upchurch is now executive director of Hopeful Africa, the nonprofit’s only paid staff. He leads the effort to supply seven Kenyan schools northwest of the capital Nairobi with textbooks, computers, teachers and trees.
“There was a school that sits on a high plain and erosion became a problem during the monsoon season," he says. "We would never have known that trees could help with that, and also eventually provide lumber for the school. We would never have known that would be a good project to do, but because we sat down with them, listened to them, heard their needs, we were able to do a project like that.”
Hopeful Africa pulled in around 19-thousand dollars in donations during a recent fundraiser. Overall, the nonprofit has contributed between 65-and-70 thousand dollars to the schools in Kenya. Bomett says that kind of money stretches a long way in Africa.
“To add another textbook at a school, it only costs five dollars," Bomett says. "To sponsor a student for a month, it’s only 20 dollars, to sponsor a teacher at a primary school or secondary level, it’s about 100 dollars to 150 dollars a month.”
Bomett and Upchurch say they may someday expand the reach of Hopeful Africa, maybe to Tanzania, South Sudan or Uganda. Bomett says the organization has already surpassed anything he dreamed possible when he set it up as an extracurricular activity at Valley High.
“You just look back and say wow, we were selling cookies for a dollar, we were selling some T-shirts," he says. "We were raising 200 dollars, 300 dollars, and look where we are right now, becoming an organization with all of these people supporting us.”
Bomett says he sees positive developments in Kenya. He’ll stay involved in those changes from halfway around the world through Hopeful Africa.