Fred Ndavi: From Dusty Village to Changing Lives of 186 Students [VIDEO]

Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi at the Kenyans.co.ke Offices in Nairobi on Friday, January 16, 2020.
Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi at the Kenyans.co.ke Offices in Nairobi on Friday, January 16, 2020.
Simon Kiragu

It is the intensity that greets you first, a river that would cover everything in its path. That’s the first thing you pick up about Fred Ndavi, that he is a cackling charged ball of energy that commands attention. 

It is a rarity that might not be as apparent to everyone - to find someone so subsumed in their passion that it spills out of their being when they speak.

Ndavi managed to fit us into his busy schedule that involves shuttling between Washington DC and Kenya for a sit-down on his selfless initiative borne shortly after graduating with an MBA in International Business from the Dallas Baptist University in 2011.

Bespectacled and bearded, he is in a white shirt resting against coffee skin, he begins his narration - a riveting tale of how a village boy from Ukambani thrust into the unforgiving life of an immigrant in the US, achieved career success but returned to Kenya to inspire a generation. 

Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi during an interview at Kenyans.co.ke offices in Nairobi on Friday, January 16, 2020.
Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi during an interview at Kenyans.co.ke offices in Nairobi on Friday, January 16, 2020.
Simon Kiragu
Kenyans.co.ke

“I am the executive director and founder of Inspire Spaces trust in the US. I run the organisation out of a passion I have for education for young people and what their dreams could do in their lives, in their communities, and their families.”

Inspire Spaces is far bigger than the introduction betrays, rooted in the vision carefully cultivated by Fred Ndavi - Its aim is to provide education for students in Kenya put at a disadvantage by institutionalised challenges. 

A growing necessity, Inspire Spaces, is a bridge that attempts to see over 1 million school-age children walk between the desks marking classrooms and have a chance at securing their future. The organisation aims to address education infrastructure challenges in public schools and offers scholarships for underprivileged students.

For most targeted beneficiaries, their fate has been tied to domestic work, vending in the marketplace or seeking handouts on street corners. The even bleaker alternative being early marriage, a life of crime, susceptibility to extremist radicalisation and the incapability to escape the cycle of poverty. 

Ndavi is trying to change this, one child at a time, one scholarship at a go.

“We have 186 students in the scholarship program. I feel like each one has a unique and special story. We don't take students without knowing what homes they come from, we physically go to their homes. We take a trip all the way to Garissa to actually visit the homes of the students who are coming from there and different parts of the country.

Ndavi has understood something that has escaped the attention of the vast majority of scholarship programmes that crop up in the country, that education cannot be divorced from living. One cannot throw money at it and imagine that a child, like a rose beneath concrete, will emerge and flourish if you sprinkle the tinkling of coins on it.

{"preview_thumbnail":"/files/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/SwTutgC1wtI.jpg?itok=0aqhbMgM","video_url":"","settings":{"responsive":1,"width":"854","height":"480","autoplay":0},"settings_summary":["Embedded Video (Responsive)."]}

In his own words, Ndavi explains the seed from which the tree of his vision grew.

“Inspire spaces begins with the notion that there are young people who need to go to school and what they are lacking and the reason they are not going to high school is because they can't afford to go to highschool. 

“But we knew it was more than just about the finances. Some of them are coming from broken family backgrounds and if not broken then there were things that were lacking in the conversations in the families.”

The Inspire Spaces founder resisted the urge to be boxed into the traditional definition and actualisation of scholarships in the country. Driven in equal parts by intuition and experience, Ndavi tried to do more than simply sign checks. What he was targeting was something all-encompassing, tentative steps towards that elusive but necessary notion of sustainable education.

“We said we want to do more than a scholarship. We want to engage young people in healthy conversations. We want to paint a picture of what the present really should look like because for some of them the picture is distorted. It has been distorted  by people in their own families, people in their own communities, by things that they lack and all that.”

We are born of the intertwining branches of those who have come before us and those who exist with us. It is this concept that Ndavi has weaved into the fabric of Inspire Spaces that lends to it a sheen that differentiates it from the crust of other education funds.

Children do not exist in isolation, they are a product of the communities they come from and they carry the heaviness and lightness of that wherever they go. It is this obscure truth that Ndavi has stumbled upon hidden in the dust of intention without conscious, dusted it off, paid homage to it and added it into the program. 

Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi with Kenyans.co.ke Project Manager Taaka Odera after his interview on Friday, January 16, 2020.
Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi with Kenyans.co.ke Project Manager Taaka Odera after his interview on Friday, January 16, 2020.
Simon Kiragu
Kenyans.co.ke

Ndavi’s intention is not to estrange these children from the contexts that birth them but rather to give them a freedom and space to collect the pieces of their present realities and mould from them a better future. 

“As an organisation we look at that and see how we can participate in the present for these young people to paint the picture better and allow them to do more than dream, that they actually design that dream for themselves.”

Yet, I had to wonder how the gifted speaker elected the path that he had chosen to valiantly ply despite its difficulties. How does a man from Kibwezi sight education, fixate on it and turn it by alchemy into a fire that seeks not to destroy, but to purify.

Ndavi is not a man of small ambition, his passion is a well that runs deep and from it he wants to draw and give something bigger than was possible for him. With an acceptance that bedevils most of us, the Inspire Spaces founder has chosen to unravel the patchwork quilt of his own regrets and knit from it blankets that could shield others from the cold.  

“I felt like I could have had more role models that spoke truth to my dreams that spoke reality to my future, but I didn't have some of those people. As I traveled I realised that what young people really need is not someone to give them a cash handout but someone to say we believe in you. We’re willing to walk with you, willing to dream with you and willing to set you a flight for you to do this because it's possible.”

It is this spirit that finds its home in Inspire Spaces, an incessant striving to transcend scholarship and give to those without, something intangible that goes beyond money. This is why the program, outside of the financial assistance also offers leadership and mentorship camps.

Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi at the Kenyans.co.ke Offices in Nairobi on Friday, January 16, 2020
Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi at Kenyans.co.ke offices in Nairobi on Friday, January 16, 2020
Simon Kiragu
Kenyans.co.ke

An acknowledgment of the reality that people craft themselves on the figures around them, the program is meant to give the beneficiaries, people they can mould themselves around, who can inspire them to dream outside the bounds of their own reality.

Ndavi envisions a future for Inspire Spaces that will cast a light on the lives of more people, from the hundreds, to the thousands and eventually, millions. He spends about three months in the US fundraising for the initiative and the subsequent three months are spent in Kenya interacting with beneficiaries and building capacities before returning to the US to further raise funds and acquire partners. 

It is the genuineness of Ndavi’s motivation that would convert those who had remained grudging skeptics of what he, and Inspire Spaces aims to achieve. It is the conviction of his beneficiaries that carries him through the days spent building Inspire Spaces.

He explains that it is the willingness of the students under his wing to fight, that pushes him to knock on every possible door to fundraise and ensure their dreams are kept alive.

“When a young person understands that this is a golden opportunity and tells you they'll fight, you want to say: Let's go! I’m right here with you. If you fight then I’ll fight.

“I’ll lose sleep for the young people in my group. I know the homes that they come from.” 

For me, those young people give me every reason to get on the road anywhere and everywhere in the world to find them money to go to school. It is this resilience spirit of resistance and not giving up that tells me why in the world would I settle for less even for myself?”

Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi and Kenyans.co.ke Head of Production Joseph Muiru at the Kenyans.co.ke Offices in Nairobi on Friday, January 16, 2020.
Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi and Kenyans.co.ke Head of Production Joseph Muiru after his interview on Friday, January 16, 2020.
Simon Kiragu
Kenyans.co.ke

For Ndavi, the fight is not the scholarship, the fight is for those who have been forgotten, those who have slipped through the cracks of the system, those whose hopes have been momentarily deferred as the demands of life fell incessantly, a downpour that would not let up. It is for them that Ndavi fights. 

“For us as Inspire Spaces, were going to Kibera, villages in Makueni, Garissa, Kajiado and all these places we are going to find these people exactly where they are. And from that, we go with you as far as you're willing to go.”

“Every day, I fight and I fight not because the scholarship is important, but because a kid is far too important to any of us and if we get it right we may not heal our political divisions but our younger generation will have a better way of living out their dreams and their lives and they will be an answer to some of these things the adults can’t seem to find answers to.”

From a mustard seed in 2013 with 10 students in 2014, it has grown steadily to accommodate 186 students. With a conviction, a dream and a vision, Inspire Spaces is angling to become a growing force with a tech hub, a library and training capacities to bring the youth and older folks into the nest as well.

Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi at Kenyans.co.ke offices in Nairobi on Friday, January 16, 2020
Inspire Spaces Founder Fred Ndavi at Kenyans.co.ke offices in Nairobi on Friday, January 16, 2020
Simon Kiragu
Kenyans.co.ke
  • . .