Deworming Day: A Small Partnership With a Kasarani Primary School

Intestinal worms are common in areas without consistent clean water access, and they quietly affect a child's appetite, energy, and concentration in class, often without anyone connecting the dots to a treatable cause. Abundant Life Hope coordinated a small deworming exercise with a Kasarani-area primary school, working entirely within the school's own health and consent structures rather than building a parallel system of our own.

Why We Worked Through the School, Not Around It

Schools already have consent processes, staff relationships with parents, and a captive setting well suited to something like this. Rather than trying to replicate that infrastructure ourselves, we approached the school's administration and asked whether a coordinated deworming day, run through their existing consent and health processes with a visiting public health nurse, would be welcome.

What the Day Actually Involved

A visiting public health nurse administered deworming tablets on-site, working from the school's own consent records rather than a separate system we'd have needed to build from scratch. Our role was mainly coordination: connecting the school with the nurse, covering the modest cost of the tablets, and having a couple of volunteers present to help the day run smoothly.

Being Honest About Scale

This was a single day at a single school, not the start of a district-wide deworming campaign. We don't want to overstate what a modest, one-time coordination effort accomplishes. It was useful, we believe, but it was small.

What We Learned About Working With Schools

Schools move at their own institutional pace, and coordinating around timetables, staff availability, and existing consent processes took more patience than a single community outreach day usually requires. We think that patience is worth it, since working within a school's existing structure, rather than asking it to accommodate an entirely new one, made the whole exercise smoother and more sustainable than if we'd tried to run it independently.

Whether We'll Do This Again

We're discussing a twice-yearly schedule with this same school rather than treating it as a one-off exercise, since a single deworming treatment provides only temporary benefit. We're being deliberate about not overcommitting before we've confirmed we can actually sustain a recurring schedule reliably.

A Second School Has Asked

A second school in the area has separately asked whether we'd consider a similar arrangement for their pupils, having heard about the first exercise informally. We're evaluating that request carefully, checking whether we have the coordination capacity to serve a second school properly before agreeing, rather than stretching a new partnership model too thin before we've proven it works well even at one school.

Why Deworming Specifically

Deworming is one of the higher-value, lower-cost health interventions available for school-age children in areas without consistently clean water access. A single round of tablets is inexpensive, quick to administer, and addresses a problem whose symptoms, tiredness, reduced appetite, difficulty concentrating, are often misattributed to something else entirely, a difficult temperament, an unrelated illness, or simple laziness.

What the Teachers Told Us Afterward

Teachers at the school mentioned, informally, that a few pupils seemed more energetic in the days following the exercise, though we're cautious about treating a handful of teacher observations as rigorous evidence. It's the kind of modest, plausible signal that makes us want to continue the partnership, not proof of a dramatic outcome.

What We'd Tell Another Small CBO Considering This

If another small organisation is considering something similar, our honest advice is to work through the school's existing systems rather than trying to build a parallel one. It's slower to set up initially, but it respects the school's own processes and, in our experience, produces a smoother day with fewer administrative gaps than an outside group trying to manage consent and records independently.

The Actual Cost Involved

The tablets themselves are inexpensive, the larger cost was volunteer coordination time spent scheduling with the school across several weeks. We think that's a fair trade for a health intervention with this much evidence behind it, and it's part of why we're open to repeating this with other schools that reach out, provided we can genuinely sustain the coordination involved.