About
The Tatwa Maahe Educational Trust (TMET) is a small UK-based charity supporting education in Kuria, a rural district in South West Kenya. The charity was set up to support secondary education for girls, the idea being that although poor families understandably prioritise the education of boys, the education of girls has a strong transformative impact beyond the education of the individual. TMET now sponsors bright but impoverished girls to attend secondary school and, in some cases, university. A small number of sponsorships are also given to exceptionally clever boys from a similar background.
TMET was established in 1991 by Malcolm Ruel and Suzette Heald. They named the Trust to honour two influential men, Chacha Omaahe and Magige oTatwa, who were progressive leaders and supporters of the importance of education for all.
Malcolm Ruel was a social anthropologist who had carried out fieldwork among the Kuria people in the late 1950s. While working for the University of Cambridge and returning to Kenya as a university external examiner in the late 1980s, he rekindled his ties with the Kuria people and decided to give something back to the community as a measure of his gratitude and affection. Suzette Heald, a fellow social anthropologist, has worked in Kuria since 1984 and feels a similar sense of connection to the area and its people.
Key to TMET’s establishment in Kuria were Magoiga Masubo Seba, a civil servant in the Ministry of Culture and Social Welfare, and Chacha Nyaigotti Chacha, Professor of Linguistics at the American University in Nairobi.
From the beginning, the selection of students for sponsorships has been a joint venture between the UK and Kuria. There are four committees, one for each clan, who nominate students for sponsorship. The local Kenyan coordinator, Mathias Mwita, liaises between the branches and the UK trustees to decide which students to sponsor. Working with local groups ensures that our objectives and those of the local community are in tandem and minimises administrative costs.
TMET was partially funded initially by a generous donation from Clare College, Cambridge, and student fundraising. This money was invested and continues to provide an annual income which is supplemented by individual donations and fundraising events.
When Malcolm died in 2010, Suzette became Chair of Trustees. She took the charity forward into the current era in which university education is much more widespread, and online and electronic resources are central. In 2023, Suzette passed the running of TMET to the current Chair of Trustees, Pippa Price.
"Hard work can put you in a room you never thought you could enter and there you would be judged by your intelligence and hard work not your background" - 2019 Graduate Elizabeth Watwego
