Project for funding - a new kitchen at Kiteghe... As it stands, the kitchen at Kiteghe Primary School - a simple mud-brick building which produces a daily, term-time lunch for over 225 children - is unhygienic, hazardous and outdated. In fact, it is barely even recognisable as a school kitchen. Enormous vats of food are cooked upon a handful of traditional open stone (and therefore inefficient and uneconomical) wood fires in an extremely poorly ventilated room. Years worth of pitch black soot from the thick wood-smoke is layered on every interior surface and is, without doubt, a serious health hazard to the cooks who work here on a daily basis. What we will do... We will transform the facilities for cooking lunch at the school by constructing a new kitchen. The focus of the kitchen - which will be modern by Kenyan institutional standards - will be four enormous stainless steel energy saving stoves with a combined cooking capacity of 525 litres. Clean water will be piped directly into the kitchen from a 3,000 litre polyethylene tank outside - in turn fed by gutter-collected rainwater and via a piped connection to the main village supply. We will provide washing up facilities both inside and outside the building complete with underground plumbing and drainage to collect and safely dispose of grey water and kitchen waste. The benefits... • 75 per cent reduction in firewood use - the heat retaining design of the energy saving stoves will radically improve efficiency when cooking and drastically reduce (by up to 75%) the schools’ excessive consumption (many hundreds of kilos per week) of locally collected firewood - a practice which contributes heavily to local deforestation and, in turn, to detrimental changes in the local climate; • a healthier working environment - the design of the stoves and the provision of hearths & chimneys will ensure a well-ventilated space thereby eliminating smoke and preventing the harmful build up of soot deposits in the kitchen space and, more importantly, in the lungs of the cooks; • improved hygiene - the provision of clean water ‘on tap’ and the installation of modern drainage systems to allow waste and dirty water - currently merely thrown onto the ground outside - to be drained safely away into underground soak-pits will radically improve hygiene. The project in a wider context... The construction of a modern new kitchen at Kiteghe will be an important first step towards realising our ambition of radically enhancing the quality and delivery of school lunches which we believe can impact heavily upon the welfare of children and on their ability to work. Our future plans include constructing a dining hall (so the children are no longer forced to eat lunch in the classrooms or on the ground outside); to provide cutlery (no more eating with dirty hands!) and to initiate innovative projects (such as the development of a kitchen garden) that will allow the school to grow crops to supplement and add nutritional value to the bland maize-based meals that are currently provided through the World Food Programme. Financial breakdown... (£) materials costs 2,893 construction equip. 92 energy-saving stoves 2,708 weighing scales 17 3,000lit water tank 175 labour costs 584 transport costs 58 TOTAL 6,527