Kenya: Malindi Business Community Aids Children’s Festival

By Staff Writer

MALINDI---Thanks in large part to the generous support of a diversity of members from the Malindi business communities, Malindi will host the second edition of the Malindi Music Festival for Children organized by CISP- (Comitato Internazionale per lo Sviluppo dei Popoli) NGO on February 19th. This year’s festival will be held under the theme, “Promoting the Malindi for Education Campaign” which identifies access to quality education as a priority. The campaign also seeks to stimulate resource mobilization for actions to improve access to education on the Kenyan Coast.

Key Supporters of last year’s edition of the Festival such as the Key Group, Casino Malindi, Milano Electronics, Air Kenya and GCM Generators and Royal Media decided to continue the generous support to ensure this year’s edition is just as successful. New partners this year include Imperial Bank and Royal Professional Sounds.

Thanks to these many generous donations, the festival will once again be free of charge and held at the old Sinbad Hotel, situated on Lamu Road, next to Casino Malindi.  The old Sinbad was rehabilitated by CISP and its partners last year in order to become a “community friendly space” which has since been used for many other purposes.  This year, Naran Danji and Ganesh Ltd contributed resources to rehabilitate the area, removing hazards and making it safer so that it may host large numbers of people, specifically children.

One of the major goals of the Malindi for Education Campaign is to sign support agreements with especially Italian tour operators and charter airlines. Last year, an estimated 90 000 Italian tourists came to Kenya according to the Kenyan Tourist Board and CISP’s goal is to raise at least one Euro from each tourist.

Festivities will commence at 10 am with a children’s fair including various activities for children, art sessions for children including street theatre, face painting, balloon modeling, acrobats, a fire show, puppet shows, drama and songs.

The main concert will again take place in the evening starting at 8:30 PM with a diverse and star-studded international lineup including Paola Turci and Tony Esposito with special guests Eric Wainaina, Nyota Ndogo, Susumila, AMREF JuaKali drummers, Mr. Bado and friends from MADCA.

The Malindi for Education campaign supports the CISP’s Education programnme, initiated in 2007, which now works with 41 rural community schools reaching over 2.850 students in the area north of Malindi now called Magarini District.  The programme works more specifically on creating awareness about the importance of education within the impoverished communities, trains teachers and supports a Teacher Training College, community school management, government programmes linked to improving access to education, water and sanitation and health programmes. The project works also to improve education infrastructure including support to public primary schools and building community run schools.

The Festival, hopes to also build on last year’s theme of celebrating both local culture and ethnic diversity in Malindi as well as in Kenya.