Success Thus Far
The Maasai Scholarship Fund is just beginning its educational journey working with the Maasai Community in and around Narok County, Kenya. We are happy to report that in 2024 we have distributed $6,500. We awarded thirty-seven scholarships; twenty-six for secondary school, and eleven for college. These scholarships cover school tuition, books, food, clothing and travel expenses, including the ability for parents to travel to see their children at school. Because of our uniquely close relationship with the community ninety percent of the funds go directly to the students with the remaining ten percent used to support local management teams in Kenya.
Please stay tuned for updates from our first thirty-seven recipients.
Maasai Scholarship Fund
A New Generation of Maasai Leaders
Why Education?
Western education is a mixed blessing in Maasailand. On one hand, though primary education is mandated, no schools are built in Maasailand by the national government, and so access is limited and often unaffordable, and many students fail or are forced to drop out. Further, the national curriculum taught in these schools often misrepresents Maasai culture and history as ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’, supporting outside development agendas for Maasai land. However, school also provides tools necessary for Maasai survival, especially literacy and English language acquisition, and thus most Maasai send their boys and girls to school. In Maasai culture, the qualities of leadership are often identified in childhood and nurtured with special attention to cultural development. In recent years, we have seen the tremendous potential when those identified future leaders are also provided quality western education.
Thus a vision has emerged in Maasailand for a blended education system that values both western and Indigenous knowledge and can produce strong leadership that can move in both worlds. A critical next step is for a broad representation of the community to have the authority over educational resources to use them strategically for the good of individual children and the community as a whole.
Our Mission
To support the vision of the Maasai community to create a new generation of leadership educated broadly in both Maasai and Western knowledge.
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Meitamei's Story
“I began my life as a child born to the Maasai people of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. My first years were typical of those of Maasai children everywhere: I was welcomed into a large village with several mothers and many brothers and sisters, given milk to drink and skins to sleep on, and began learning to herd goats and sheep almost from the time I could walk. During those early years my destiny seemed clear. I would build my family’s herds, father many children of my own, and live in that same community my entire life. No one who knew me then could have imagined that I would one day teach university students in the U.S. and have friends in different parts of the world, or that I would be a candidate for Kenyan Parliament. Today I feel that I am the most privileged person that I know or can imagine. My privilege is not a matter of riches—I don’t own thousands of acres of land or vast herds of cattle."
"I am privileged because I have the means to move between worlds, to see life through many sets of eyes, and to learn from people in circumstances different from those that I have known myself. That ability is what becoming educated means to me."
"For the Maasai people, as well as Indigenous communities across the globe, education has been destructive to culture. Many indigenous people have been drawn away from home through education, forced to choose between their cultures on the one hand, and benefits that come from knowing the world outside on the other. My privilege in life is my reward for having rejected this choice. I became educated, but have not abandoned my community for the educated world. Instead, my education has given me the opportunity to build relationships with the world on behalf of Maasai people. I have given my life to fight for justice and equality for my people, for the protection of their land, and to see that every Maasai child be given as much as I have been given."
Beyond his loving commitment as Co-Founder of Dopoi Center and the Institute for Maasai Education, Research, and Conservation (MERC), Meitamei Olol Dapash is a community leader in Maasailand who was one of the first of his generation of Maasai boys to be taken to school.