Carolyn Olaka: A Treasure at the Nambale Magnet School

May 2025 - Carolyn Olaka is the social worker at the Nambale Magnet School (NMS). She has been on staff since before the school opened in 2009. Carolyn has two primary responsibilities. She oversees the student selection process, especially for the orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) attending NMS, who compose one-third of the student body.

Her other priority is to provide emotional help and guidance for all the students of the school, but especially the OVCs, who come from extremely impoverished backgrounds and receive full financial support (many of them from you!) in pursuing their educations.
 
When the school opened, Carolyn had been working as a social worker in the Busia region. She felt a strong spiritual call to dedicate her time fully to the school and was one of NMS’ first employees. She developed the use of an application form, a United Nations survey for rating the severity of risk for orphans and other vulnerable children, and interfaced with local communities to verify that the stories she was being told were in fact true. All this was to ensure that the relatively limited resources of NMS would be best utilized. 
 

The UN form has proved crucial in creating an objective standard for evaluating OVCs. It has 25 questions which rate a child’s circumstances on the scale of 1 to 4, with 1 being the lowest and 4 being the highest. In the question addressing shelter, 1 means a child has no consistent place to sleep and often sleeps outside unsheltered. 4 means the child has a roof over their head every night and sleeps in the same place every night. The possible range of scores is from 25 to 100. Most of the fully sponsored students at NMS have scores between 40 and 60. 
 
When school is in session Carolyn's office is the place children go when they need to speak with somebody whom they can trust to talk about how their day is going and how they are doing socially at school. She also helps to train the staff in how to interact with children and how to spot problems. She knows the names and stories of most if not all of the 500 students at the school, and knows the OVC stories at a detailed level.
 
Carolyn’s son, Austin, was one of the first fee-paying students at the school back in 2009. Today, Austin is pursuing a degree in special education at a university in Mombasa with plans to become a special education

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