The Kibwezi Educational Center is a learning center in the town of Kibwezi, Kenya. It contains a polytechnic offering two-year vocational programs in carpentry, masonry, welding, and tailoring. There is also a secretarial department which requires students to have graduated from secondary school. A primary school and preschool are for grades one though eight. Scholarships are available for need based students such as orphans. There are around thirty children in the greater Kibwezi area supported and sometimes under scholarship for educational costs.
Samuel Mote is the director of the Educational Centre.
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Since 1988, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa and Burke Presbyterian Church, PCUSA, have worked together to build a partnership in Kibwezi. This historical location is where in 1891 the first three Scottish missionaries came to Kenya, and where two died as a result of malaria. That is the historical significance of the international partnership formed in a remote bush town half way between Nairobi and Mombasa.
Harambee is Swahili for "working together". To maintain a close connection, Burke Presbyterian Church sends a work camp to Kiwebzi every three years. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of when the first work camp traveled to Kibwezi. The demographics of each group is approximately fifteen adults and ten adults. In 2008, a leadership team of eight adults is traveling to Kibwezi to evaluate the past twenty years of work camp partnership and to develop a long term plan for the project's future. Some issues to be discuss the possibility of developing new village churches, increasing the orphan care program, and creating a micro financing system (similar to a credit union, but for small business loans) in the town of Kibwezi which will remain separate from the church and Educational Centre, and finally the delivery of six laptop computers from the One Laptop Per Child program. The next work camp was held in 2009 and included delivery of another 100 OLPC laptops.
For more information see The Burke Presbyterian Church's web page.[1]