The Equity Group Foundation has opened applications for its 2021 Wings to Fly scholarship program.
The program is implemented in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation and the German state-owned investment and development bank KfW.
Commissioned in 2015 by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, the program has received $41 million in financing from the Mastercard Foundation for a nine-year period.
Through the program, the foundation was able to award 2,000 students with extended high school scholarships in 2015 alone.
The foundation has also announced applications for the 2021 Elimu scholarship program.
Elimu is a Kenyan government-run educational scholarship funded by the World Bank through the Education Ministry and the foundation. It aims to improve secondary education and covers school fees, transport and learning materials for academically gifted students and orphans with financial needs, who are interested in giving back to society.
Wings to Fly and Elimu will offer 10,500 scholarships to scholars from underprivileged backgrounds who excelled in the 2020 Kenya Certificate Primary Education exams.
In a statement, Equity Group Executive Chairman James Mwangi said: “As Equity, we truly to value the role of the various partners that we work with at the community level to ensure that our selection process is fair and that a vast majority of Kenyans get to hear about the programs and are guided appropriately on how to apply for the scholarships. This year, we wish to encourage interested applicants to embrace the use of the digital portals as this will minimize paper handling and will thus contribute to our efforts of minimizing the risk of exposure to COVID-19.”
The Equity Group Foundation is the corporate social responsibility arm of the Mwangi-led Equity Group Holdings Ltd. It recently partnered with the Kenya Forest Service and University of Nairobi to plant about 7,000 seedlings to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change in the East African country.
