An International Presence

In September 2025, GDP helped open the doors of St. Rita Evergreen Girls School in Nyahururu — a place the Maasai call "the place of storms." East Africa's first trauma-informed residential school to allow vulnerable girls to remain with their children while both mother and child receive education, care, and healing. Founded by Dr. Phyllis Njoki Kagimbi, St. Rita is not a shelter program. It is a rebuilding program.

The GDP team visited St. Rita's campus in 2025, spending days alongside students and staff. Solar lighting had been installed. Computers with Wi-Fi were running. Blankets had been distributed. Upgraded living spaces made the girls feel — many for the first time — that they were worth investing in. One young mother told the team: "This school gave me my life back — and gave my child a future." Another said, "This is the first place where I felt my child and I were both wanted."

By year's end, more than 40 girls and their children were in residence. The waiting list surpassed 2,000. Wildlings Cottage School in South Carolina established a formal sister-school and pen pal relationship with St. Rita students — a bond that crosses two continents and reminds these girls the world is watching them grow.

GDP's partner homes — Project of Hope, Compassionate Children's Home, and Good Samaritan Children's Home — provided daily care, meals, school supplies, and educational support to more than 590 children throughout 2025. But the story of children's care in 2025 goes beyond the homes themselves.

At Osarai Primary School in Maasai country, GDP field teams arrived quarterly to find children who had walked miles barefoot across thorn-filled terrain to reach school. Many arrived hungry. GDP's quarterly feeding program served 110+ children each visit. During one visit, Michael Wright was appointed mzee — a title of honor among Maasai elders — by community leaders who had watched GDP show up, year after year, without conditions. Attendance and graduation rates at Osarai more than doubled since GDP's sustained involvement began.

At Project of Hope in Nairobi, the Special Needs Children's Center continued providing food, therapy support, adaptive education, and daily care for orphaned children with physical and developmental disabilities. As one caregiver put it, "no one wants to see or care to even know exist." GDP came. And stayed.

Patricia Ann Wright's Women's Empowerment initiative reached more than 5,500 women across Kenya in 2025 through three annual conferences, training programs, feeding distributions, and direct community support. More than 2,000 of those women were widows — who received food, dignity, and the steady presence of an organization that treated them as people worth investing in.

The women who attended GDP's conferences in 2024 came back in 2025 — and brought neighbors. The ripple from a single empowerment summit spreads into a community long after the chairs are put away. Women who once had no voice in their households began training others.

Over 60% of East Africa's population is under 25. Youth unemployment across the region can reach 25%, according to the International Labor Organization. In 2025, GDP's network of 12 Youth Leadership Centers responded with quarterly empowerment summits throughout Kenya, reaching hundreds of youth from diverse communities — including participants who traveled from Uganda.

These summits were not lectures. They were lively, interactive spaces where young people shared experiences, built friendships across cultures, and were treated — perhaps for the first time — as the leaders they are already becoming.

At Osarai Primary School, GDP's sustained involvement produced measurable results — doubled attendance and graduation rates among children who previously arrived hungry after walking miles barefoot. The feeding program kept them in their seats long enough to learn.

The Evelyn S. Weatherspoon Scholarship Fund produced its defining story of 2025: 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 (KMTC). She is now training to serve the communities that raised her. One donor's faithfulness. One girl's future. One community's future doctor.

2025 was the year the GDP Multiplex Center in Mombasa went from vision to concrete reality. Construction progressed significantly — the physical structure rising from the ground because of donors who believed in a facility that did not yet exist. The Multiplex is GDP's answer to a question the organization has asked for thirty years: how do we serve more people, more consistently, without burning through resources on recurring venue costs?

The answer is a permanent coastal campus with a 1,100-seat auditorium, classrooms, career centers, and dormitories for men and women — enabling participants from remote and high-risk regions to attend multi-day summits that would otherwise be entirely out of reach. Community leaders on-site said it plainly: "This center will change what is possible for our youth. It gives them a place to gather, learn, and believe again."

GDP's clean water infrastructure continued providing safe water access to more than 2,000 people daily in 2025. The time women and children once spent walking hours to unsafe water sources is now redirected to school, livelihood, and family. GDP's humanitarian footprint included food distributions, emergency medical support, and Musoli Village community infrastructure commissioned in 2025 — slow, faithful commitment to seeing a community through.