Inspires children to read, play and be creative and empowers adults to run our free community libraries and learning centres by providing training and opportunities to lead.
How You Can Help
- Simply book your next holiday with Charitable Travel and tell us you want to support Just be a Child. The charity will then benefit from the free donation you can make as part of the booking process. To read more about how this works, head to our ‘About us‘ page.
- If you want to make a donation to Just be a Child and you are not booking a holiday, click here to visit their website.
- Visit justbeachild.com to sign up to newsletters, and follow the Just be a Child social media pages, and help spread the word.
How You Can Help
How You Can Help
- Simply book your next holiday with Charitable Travel and tell us you want to support Just be a Child. The charity will then benefit from the free donation you can make as part of the booking process. To read more about how this works, head to our ‘About us‘ page.
- If you want to make a donation to Just be a Child and you are not booking a holiday, click here to visit their website.
- Visit justbeachild.com to sign up to newsletters, and follow the Just be a Child social media pages, and help spread the word.
- Simply book your next holiday with Charitable Travel and tell us you want to support Just be a Child. The charity will then benefit from the free donation you can make as part of the booking process. To read more about how this works, head to our ‘About us‘ page.
- If you want to make a donation to Just be a Child and you are not booking a holiday, click here to visit their website.
- Visit justbeachild.com to sign up to newsletters, and follow the Just be a Child social media pages, and help spread the word.
We believe that life is about more than just surviving. We believe in the power of childhood, getting messy while being creative, drawing inspiration from books and life experiences. But we also believe in giving voice and responsibilities to the local communities.
And so together and in equal partnership, driven by volunteers in the UK and in Kenya, we collect tens of thousands of books and textbooks and tonnes of arts and crafts material as well as toys, jigsaw puzzles and games and ship them once a year to Kenya. Once there, with the help of eager volunteers we convert the 40ft shipping container into the free, well stocked, colourful and entirely community owned Library and Learning Centre.
Each community partner will remain Just be a Child’s partner for life. This means that we will continue to maintain each Just be a Child’s library and playground, re-stock them with books and furniture and with the community develop and deliver programmes that children and young people need and want.
We are building one library per year, and have done so since 2015. But we hope to build 30 libraries by 2030. We can only meet our target in partnership and collaboration with other Kenyan organisations and so we provide books to at least two libraries per year. Those libraries are run and maintained by other organisations and charities.
Let's talk numbers
We have delivered in excess of 115,000 books to 490,000 readers of all ages throughout 7 of JBAC libraries and learning centres, 5 partner libraries and 250 schemes across Kenya.
Our 7 playgrounds are used by over 1,500 children every month.
Our arts and craft sessions provide access to 20 activities together with all the material needed and across the 7 locations cater for over 830 children each month.
Our Multi-Activity Days are specially designed to teach 112 teenagers every session the transferrable skills they might need. But we do it through fun and games.
Our annual writing competition is growing in popularity and we regularly receive over 300 stories.
It's a community thing
Life is about more than surviving each day, but sometimes it takes a speck of imagination, a dust of knowledge and someone to point out the new path. Just be a Child is all about the community sprit and giving children the tools to make different choices. They in turn will guide their own children and together they will break through the cycle of poverty.
Community development can only be effective if the community is behind it, 100%. If they understand the benefits and if they have what it takes to stick by it. And we are happy and proud to say that all our community partners are amazing and exceeding our own, pretty high, expectations.
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Get in touch
UK Registered charity: 1153532
Kenyan registered CBO LSSS/MSAMB/DN/42130/2017
by net effect