One Peace at a Time — The Right to an Education

In five years of talking global problems and solutions with Nobel laureates, one of their most common sentiments has been the need for improving schools and expanding education in every corner of world. What would you predict the results of a world that spends a hundred times as much on weapons and war as it does on education? Last year at the Clinton Global Initiative, I heard Queen Rania of Jordan sum it up nicely.

“It takes eleven billion dollars a year to educate every child,” Rania told us. “Eleven billion is about 10% of NATO’s military budget for last year (and about what Europe pays for ice cream every year). If we spend 11 billion dollars less on defense and military expenses and more on education, imagine the kind of peace, security, and not to mention prosperity that you can buy.”

Global military spending is now 1.5 trillion dollars, complete madness, particularly while essentially ignoring one of the most likely paths to a more peaceful planet, education.

I’ve seen a lot of poor schools in various corners of the world – schools with walls made of thorns, schools where high school students were sitting on stones because they had no chairs, schools where kids were walking hours to attend classes. When you have kids willing to tolerate those conditions for the opportunity to learn, it’s easy to see that a little bit of money can go a long ways. So lemme give you an example.

It’s been almost five years since I first visited St. Joseph Mahiga Primary School in rural Kenya. I was filming the tree-planting work of Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai and her organization the Green Belt Movement, and wanted to plant trees with school kids.

In a stroke of fortune, I found myself in the company of a local naturalist, Joseph Mutongu, who took me to his local primary school that was on the brink of collapse. What I found were too many students and not enough teachers; mud floors and wood slat walls that let in the constant winds, very few textbooks and no other school supplies besides painted blackboards and broken pieces of chalk. At the top of each chalkboard was the school’s motto, “Hard Work Pays”.

After I planted tree seedlings with the students, I asked the principal why some of the trees they’d planted a year earlier were brown.

“Each of the kids is assigned a tree to water,” he told me. “But it’s a long walk to bring the water and the kids are small.”

I asked how far, and he said, “A mile and a half.”

It was the same distance for the water they carried back to drink while at school, water that often made them sick. Absenteeism was chronic. Dropout rates were high.

So I did the obvious thing, I promised to help build a water system for the school.

My pledge didn’t turn out to be a simple one, but it was one of the great decisions of my life. My wife and I had been discussing the need for an education nonprofit that would help us share the insights of the Nobel laureates we were working with. In that one moment, I realized that The Nobelity Project could be an education and action nonprofit.

Five years later we’re in schools and colleges, on the internet, and working on the ground on issues that we feel are essential priorities for generations to come.

But first we had to raise the money for the Mahiga water project. Drilling a deep borehole in the mountain location was too pricey. A pvc pipeline could have been cut up and stolen. The best solution was a rainwater collection system. The design and estimate were completed by the local community while we began to raise money in Austin.

The biggest support came from 12-year-old Julian Kunik, who adopted the school as his Mitzvah project and single-handedly raised over $3,000. We raised more money through Nobelity Project events in Austin, and when the Kenyan education district heard about the work we were doing, their commitment to the school increased as well.

Three years after that first visit, I returned to Mahiga with Joseph Mutongu for a ribbon-cutting and celebration of the progress we’d made at the school. We’d invested less than $10,000 dollars in the school and the result was a new water system, electricity (for the first time ever), a computer lab with 17 of the famed $100 laptops (though they actually cost double that), and a new block of classrooms with concrete floors, sold stone walls, and glass windows.

We couldn’t have done it without Joseph, Julian and many other supporters, but I got to drink the ceremonial first glass of water (the sweetest water that’s ever passed my lips, and the only tap water I drink in rural Africa).

At a grand gathering, the District Education Supervisor, Agnes Munuhu, addressed students, staff and parents and announced that St. Joseph’s was now highest rated school in the district! Trying to understand how the school turned around so dramatically with so little expenditure, my best conclusion was that parents and students simply knew someone cared. This was an opportunity which they could seize and which might change their community forever.

There were other opportunities to seize that day. Agnes Munuhu also announced that the Education District had found the money to operate a High School at Mahiga. Guess who raised his hand and said he’d be the partner who would build it?

A solid primary school is a good start, but education shouldn’t end at the 8th grade. Mahiga Hope High School is going to serve a large area and will, I hope, open the door to a better future for hundreds of young people and their community.

We have a good deal of money to raise but we have a grand vision and we’re making good progress. The Nobelity Project’s design for an innovative RainWater Court recently won Nike Foundation’s international GameChangers design competition. Architecture for Humanity will oversee construction at Mahiga of the world’s first “net-positive” basketball court that will also collect and purify drinking water for the school, serve as an outdoor classroom, a community meeting space and more. Nike and AfH are talking about replicating the design in locations around the world.

Joseph is once again helming our work, and we are finalizing plans for the first eight classrooms, a library, a computer lab and a full science lab equipped for biology, chemistry and physics.

Is a quarter million dollars too much to build a high school that will complete a 12-year education for boys and for girl, who are often left out of the education equation, particularly for secondary schools. A new study from the World Bank shows that just one additional year of education for girls increases their earnings by 10 to 20 percent.

Why are we doing this? Because we believe it’s the right thing to do. And because smarter, more productive kids in Kenya mean a smarter, more productive world for all of us.

Muhammad Yunus and Desmond Tutu, two of the Nobel laureates in my new film One Peace at a Time, are calling for a new Global Fund for Education fund, something President Obama and Congress could pay for with one less warship.

But these kids can’t wait for America to get smart. Five dollars will buy a new science textbook. Five thousand will build a classroom with your name on the door. To help build Mahiga Hope High School, go to www.nobelity.org and click on “Make a Donation.”

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