The Italian Onlus "Still I Rise" founded by the young Cremonese writer and collaborator Nicolò Govoni is ready to open in Kenya the first international school for refugees from all over the African continent.
The school will be built in Nairobi and will welcome urban refugees, disadvantaged Kenyan children, children from Dadaab camps, the largest refugee camp in Sub-Saharan Africa, near Somalia and Kakuma, on the border with Ethiopia: students will be welcomed in the school in residential formula.
Now the enthusiasm of Govoni, who after getting to know the reality of the refugees on the island of Samos, Greece, and having founded a school for the young guests of the camps, has already inaugurated a similar project, the first international school for refugees in Gaziantep, Turkey not far from the border with Syria, will bring education and hope to over 100 disadvantaged children in Kenya.
The Dadaab refugee camp, in particular, is one of the hubs of Africa from which journeys of hope depart, but in the past the opening of a secondary school and the first university have already shown how education can truly save the lives of new generations. Many children of Somali origin have been awarded scholarships and some of them have made the headlines, such as artists, models, sportsmen and researchers.
Nicolò Govoni was born in 1993 in Cremona, where he grew up and studied. At the age of twenty he left for India and joined a humanitarian mission at Dayavu Boy's Home orphanage. After saving the children's center from closure by launching a fundraiser, he founded his own non-profit organization and graduated in journalism. In 2015 he published his first book, "Uno" with an independent publishing house and worked for the BBC Knowledge channel and the newspapers "South China Morning Post" and "Metropolis Japan". After a small interlude in Palestine, Rizzoli published his second book in 2018, "White as God", which achieves a surprising sales result just as the very young Nicolò is starting a new life, thanks to the help of thousands of readers he continues his activity as a collaborator with the non-profit organization "Still I Rise" founded by him in the European refugee center on the island of Samos, Greece, where he meets aberrant situations. In 2019 he published the book "If he were my son" always with Rizzoli and thanks also to the sales generated by his books and the media tam generated by his diaries on social networks, he opened in Gaziantep in Turkey the first international school for refugees.
Now begins the toughest adventure of all, that of Kenya with the refugees from Dadaab and Kakuma and the street kids from Nairobi.