When Martha Wanjiru got the news that she had been accepted at Alliance Girls, she was over the moon with joy as it was her first choice and one of her two dream schools.
She emerged as the top student at Parklands Primary, beating 210 others to score 68 out of 72 points.
But as the deadline for reporting to Alliance Girls' nears, that joy turned to tears as her parents' several attempts to raise school fees hit a dead end.
The father, Daniel Muchoki Mwangi, says feeding his family has been a struggle over the past three years since his business premises at Gikomba market were broken into.
“I’m still hopeful that things will change, that Martha will report to school and her future will be okay,” said Mr Muchoki who deals in home appliances.
His business, which also has an M-Pesa shop, has also been hit twice by fire incidents, and it is as though every time he tries to pick up the pieces, another tragedy strikes.
At the time of the break-in incident in July 2022, he had been servicing a loan from Equity Bank which he had taken to restock the business. He had been servicing it seamlessly and was left with a balance of Sh265,000.
As servicing this loan became a challenge, compelling him to take another loan with Cooperative Bank, this time using his piece of land in Ruiru as collateral.
“I have since defaulted on the Coop Bank loan as business hasn’t picked and now face the risk of my property being auctioned to recover the money,” says Mr Muchoki, who says even the landlord is on his case.
Martha Wanjiru from Parklands Primary School (centre) with her father Daniel Muchoki, and mother Catherine Njeri during an interview at the Nation Centre in Nairobi on January 15, 2026. She scored 68 points in the 2025 KJSEA results and has been unable to report to her dream school, Alliance Girls', due to lack of school fees.
His wife does menial jobs such as laundry to get the family by, but even this has been too little to supplement what the husband brings home.
Attempts to get sponsorship through scholarships to support their daughter have not been successful, leaving the family in distress. The family has applied for sponsorship at the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, KCB Foundation and Family Bank Foundation to no avail.
When they took their pleas to the office of the Governor in Nairobi, they were informed at the reception lobby that the sponsorship chapter had long been closed. Their next stop is the office of the Woman Representative of Nairobi.
“Mathematics is my favorite subject and I scored Exceeding Expectation 1 (EE1) in it. I aspire to be a software engineer,” says Martha, who divulged that her secret to success is time management and using limited resources around her.
Mr Muchoki has tried his hand in taxi business as an Uber driver, but the job was terminated within a month.
