"Period poverty" and the "Homa Bay girls"
File under: Crowd-funding" campaign at start-up charity
Pecking for dollars
It doesn't get more basic than this: periods, poverty, girls' education. The project depends on your gift of poultry, at $3 per bird.
ABOVE: April 21, 2026 • Zoom call with Nairobi. Jerim Onguru on the left. We met on LinkedIn. He's written a book. "My Breaking the Poverty Bond in Africa book talks more of how scanning my environment got me on this... I'm finding it a very expensive mission to pursue if you don't have any collaboration." On the right: the "designated idiot" (my chosen role when developing cases). We're chatting through why someone might care to support his crowdfunding campaign to "empower Homa Bay girls." I posted about the project later on LinkedIn, BELOW....
Jerim has a registered charity in Kenya that gives away sanitary products to adolescent girls who can't afford them otherwise. Instead, many girls improvise and skip school during their periods, setting back their educations, once menstruation begins. Boys don't have that issue, of course.
To fund this free service long-term, Jerim has built a serious chicken coop; a mini-farm, really, in a single building.
The coop is quite sturdy; purpose built for poultry; tight, nice, and new. It will be a dependable business. The revenue from eggs and such will cover the cost of quality sanitary products distributed freely. He has a little video tour of the new coop that will foot the bill for the program in the future. Everything's ready...
...and chickenless.
The coop awaits chickens. It lacks the sound of clucking, which is also in this case the sound of a successfully self-supporting nonprofit mission.
Step 1 is done (coop built).
Step 3 is establishing a reliable source of income, using the proceeds from chicken farming to purchase free sanitary products for the community's schoolgirls.
Step 2 is chicks.
ChatGPT drew us a campaign thermometer in a matter of seconds.
Can I interest anyone today in a chick?
You. perchance?
The cost is $3 per well-bred chick; same price in Kenya as in America. The coop needs 200 lives chicks to launch: $600 total.
I've given all I can for the year; over $1,000. Jerim and I continue to Zoom for chats about donor comms and the perils of crowdbased fundraising.
Chicks mean girls in the community served can keep their busy social and school lives uninterrupted, no matter what day of the month it is.
The need couldn't be any easier to understand or relate to: supplying girls with sanitary products they otherwise cannot buy. Net benefit to girls? Empowerment. Net benefit to society? So those girls #stayinschool.
Jerim's coop exists because the urgent, monthly problem many girls face in Kenya can be remedied by offering free feminine-hygiene products throughout their school years. That requires a steady income other than donations, which are unpredictable. #periodpoverty holds girls back.
But first: Acquiring those chicks for the coop (which can accommodate up to 400 at a time)—if you can risk $3. Jerim was a stranger to me, coming out of the blue via LinkedIn.
I told him that I could not easily verify his claim that he is a government-approved charity in Kenya. We messaged about donor comms, then we spoke by Zoom. His sincerity and ambition impressed me. I took the risk more than once and gave, as the project advanced.
If the plight of "period-poor, school-interrupted" schoolgirls moves you at all, consider planting a chicken or two yourself. I bought 37, one for each year Simone Joyaux and I were married. She would have loved this cause, as a type of cage-rattling "female empowerment." Jerim's mission awaits your trust and faith and best wishes for a good education.
By the way, Home Bay town of 45,000 on the shore of Lake Victoria, the planet's second-largest fresh water body of water (after Lake Superior); Victoria is the source of the Nile, as you likely recall. Buy a chicken. See Lake Victoria through the lens of your good work in Homa Bay.
Bluck-bluck-bluckingly yours,
~ tom
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