GDP's Most Active Year

2024 was the year the GDP Multiplex Center in Mombasa went from vision to construction. This was the strategic breakthrough GDP had been building toward for years — a permanent coastal campus that would eliminate recurring venue costs for every summit, conference, and leadership training GDP hosts, while dramatically expanding the number of people reached each year.

The Multiplex Center is designed to house a 1,100-seat auditorium, classrooms, career centers, and dormitories for both men and women — enabling participants from rural and high-risk communities to attend multi-day programs that would otherwise be entirely beyond reach. Community leaders on-site reflected what GDP had believed for years: "This center will change what is possible for our youth. It gives them a place to gather, learn, and believe again."

2024 marked a landmark moment for GDP's Youth Empowerment initiative: the formal establishment of 12 Youth Leadership Centers across Kenya, with quarterly empowerment summits now reaching hundreds of young people. Over 60% of East Africa's population is under 25 — youth unemployment can reach 25% across the region. GDP's quarterly summits responded with lively, interactive spaces where young people from diverse communities gathered, shared experiences, and were treated as the leaders they are becoming. In 2024, that reach extended to Uganda.

2024 saw the formal launch of the Evelyn S. Weatherspoon Scholarship Fund — a named scholarship pipeline connecting students from GDP's partner children's homes to secondary school, vocational training, and university pathways. In 2025, the defining proof arrived: Mercy Deborah Nyamuze — raised from Nairobi's Mathare slum and supported through GDP's partner homes — was awarded a scholarship to Kenya Medical Training College. She is now training to become a healthcare professional in the communities that once raised her. That outcome was made possible by a foundation laid in 2024.

In October 2024, GDP launched the "Truck Loads of Hope" campaign — a targeted push to raise $15,000 to deliver school supplies, essential equipment, and critical support across three children's homes before year's end. The campaign delivered. The three partner homes — Project of Hope Children's Home, Compassionate Children's Home, and Good Samaritan Children's Home — each received supplies by November and December 2024. The Special Needs Center at Project of Hope received dedicated equipment funding as part of this campaign.

GDP's field teams also completed significant classroom improvements across partner school facilities in 2024. At one partner school, 10 of 11 classrooms were improved — floors, lighting, structural repairs — through sustained donor investment. These are not one-time gifts. They are the cumulative result of people who came back, year after year, because GDP was still there.

GDP's Women's Empowerment initiative — led by co-founder Patricia Ann Wright — continued reaching more than 5,500 women annually in 2024 through conferences, feeding programs, training, and direct community support. More than 2,000 of those women were widows — among the most economically vulnerable people in any Kenyan community — who received food, dignity, and the steady presence of an organization that treated them as people worth investing in.

Women who attended GDP conferences in prior years came back in 2024 — and brought others. The ripple from a single conference lasts longer than the chair rental. It changes how a woman carries herself in her community, how she speaks to her children about what is possible, and how she positions herself to help the next woman who arrives with nothing.

At Osarai Primary School in Maasai country, 2024 continued a pattern of transformation that began years earlier and never stopped. Children who once walked miles barefoot across thorn-filled terrain now arrived at improved classrooms. GDP's sustained involvement — quarterly feeding programs, classroom renovations, educational supply drops, and relational presence — produced a measurable result: attendance and graduation rates more than doubled. No ribbon-cutting. No building named after a donor. GDP showed up because the children were there.

GDP's clean water infrastructure continued serving more than 2,000 people daily in 2024 — wells, boreholes, and storage tanks maintained through GDP's in-country field presence. Humanitarian aid and crisis response continued across Kenya — food distributions, emergency medical support, and direct relief to communities facing seasonal hardship, delivered without third-party intermediaries by a team that has known these communities for years.