Kilifi county KENYA, has one of the highest illiteracy levels in the country with an adult literacy rate of about 42%. About 52% of Kilifi residents have a primary level of education only and most students abandon or abscond school mainly due to poverty.

The Directors of KVA, despite bring fully engaged in the field of commercial enterprise under the brand https://www.theimagefoundry.org/, have since 2018 been involved in photography and videography training workshops with CANON.

What makes our offering innovative is we have found a way to expand our product offering and incorporate a significant number of the UN SDGs as well as Blue Economy principals into the KVA facility. In designing our visual arts training programmes, we realized we needed to address the totality of the individual we were targeting. We saw that not only did we need to meet educational needs and promote professional upskilling, we had to address what led to such gaps in education in the first place.

We also realized that to be successful, the facility had to endear itself to the community by undertaking specific initiatives to address dire community concerns - meeting some of these needs would help KVA plant its roots as a contributing entity to the overall success of the community.

Lastly we realized that to be forward looking and responsible citizens, we needed the facility to be fully sustainable and carbon negative.

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Sharon Mitchener
Executive Director