Kenya does not have one story. It has thousands of them, and two that arrived at Because International this year happen to sit at opposite ends of the country's map—and opposite ends of what it means to grow up without shoes.

One is Mandera County, a stretch of arid land at Kenya's northeastern tip, bordering Ethiopia and Somalia, where children walk to school on ground that bakes in the afternoon sun, through paths lined with thorns and scorpions. The other is Nairobi's informal settlement corridor—Mukuru Viwanda, Mukuru Nyayo, South B—where the danger underfoot is broken glass, exposed metal and raw sewage instead of sand and snakes. Rural and urban. Desert and city. Two partner organizations, two very different landscapes, and the same barefoot walk to school.

The rural extreme: Mandera County

One of Because International's newest partners in the region, the Organization for Sustainable Development Africa (OSDA), works in one of Kenya's most remote and underserved counties. OSDA's field team—coordinated by Edwin Okama and Abdullahi Abdille—surveyed nine schools in Mandera this summer, including two special schools serving deaf and blind students.

The numbers are stark. At Bur Abor Primary, nearly every student in two separate classes said they regularly walk barefoot, know someone with jiggers and have been injured walking barefoot in the last six months. That pattern repeated across the network.

Teacher Beneah Wanzetse at Bella Primary connected the dots between bare feet and empty desks: "My biggest concern about children not having shoes is that some are injured. The ground is very hot during the afternoon, and now they might be injured. So it is possible that if they get some shoes, it will be very important for them so that they will like school and many of them will come to school."

At Mandera Special School for the Blind, teacher Aalim Bash Abdi put it even more directly: "When you're blind, you don't see where you're putting your foot on. So if you are barefooted, that's quite dangerous." His colleague, teacher Abdilatif Adan, named school dropout and injury as the two biggest risks he watches for daily—with no first aid kit on hand when a child arrives bleeding.

And still, the students dream forward. Bahsan Abdihakim Mohamed, 11, who lost his father and whose mother is jobless, wants to be a doctor: "I want to treat poor people." Across 41 student interviews in Mandera, nearly every child said they were "very excited" about school.

Nine schools. 3,666 students. One of the most remote corners of Kenya.

The urban extreme: Nairobi's informal settlements

A few hundred miles south and a world away in terrain, the Jaguar Youth Empowerment Foundation (JYEF) works inside Nairobi's densely packed Mukuru informal settlements. Founded by Charles Njagua Kanyi, JYEF reached out to Because International in early 2026 and completed its first shoe distribution on June 10 at St. Catherine's Comprehensive School in South B.

Where Mandera's danger is heat and wildlife, Mukuru’s is infrastructure. Teacher Otieno at St. Catherine's described it plainly: "Students are coming from slum areas where we have risk of broken glasses, metals, sewage lines. Sewage lines will expose them to various diseases."

But the surveys JYEF's coordinator Diana Maia gathered at three more schools this July surfaced something distinct from Mandera's data—a wound less physical than social. Ask a child in Nairobi's settlements what worries them about not having shoes, and the answer is as likely to be about shame as about injury.

Adelyne, age 9, at Our Lady of Mercy: "People will laugh at me. They'll be gossiping me." Taliba, 10, at the same school: "Some people laugh at me and call me poor." Samuel Mbithi, 13, at St. Catherine's, described it this way: "When you don't have shoes, you feel so sad."

Teacher Catherine Kasuki named the mechanism behind it—children are taught in class that shoes are a basic need, then go home to families who cannot provide them. "They feel like their parents are failing them," she said. Her colleague at Nairobi South, teacher Wyckliffe Onkendi Oburu, described the fix just as clearly: "When they look similar, that makes them confident and see that they are of the same level. So they can concentrate well in academics."

Diana's report after that first distribution captured the shift in real time: "Students who previously appeared withdrawn or struggled with low self-esteem showed greater confidence and enthusiasm... Children were noticeably more active during break time, running and playing freely now that they had shoes without worn-out soles or holes."

Four schools. 5,604 students, including the 1,454 already served at St. Catherine's. One of Kenya's most densely populated urban corridors.

Same country, same need, different faces

Set side by side, Mandera and Nairobi look like they shouldn't have much in common. One is sand, thorns and hundred-mile distances between towns. The other is corrugated iron, foot traffic and a school bell audible from the next block. But strip away the terrain and the same sentence keeps surfacing, spoken by teachers hundreds of miles apart: If they had shoes, they would come to school, and they would stay.

That is the case for The Shoe That Grows—a shoe that expands five sizes and lasts for years, built for exactly this kind of range. It works on hot sand in Mandera and on sewage-lined paths in Mukuru. It fits a child today and still fits her two years from now, whether her family moves, grows or simply keeps stretching every shilling to get by.

Because International's supporters are making both of these partnerships possible—the training calls, the survey trips, the school codes, the sizing data that ensures children get shoes that will last them as long as possible. Over nine thousand children, across two ends of one country, are waiting on the same thing.

Provide shoes to schoolchildren in Mandera and the Mukuru informal settlements through our 2026 Shoes For School campaign and have your gift doubled!