She Walked 24km a Day.

Twelve kilometres.

That is the distance between Veronica's home in Riara and Kimlea Girls Technical Training Centre in Kiambu.

She walked it every morning. She walked it back every evening.

Twenty-four kilometers a day, on foot, because her parents could not afford the bus fare.

Because the coffee they picked; fifteen shillings for ten kilograms, the equivalent of a tenth of a Euro, left nothing for transport. Because Veronica had decided that whatever it cost her, she was getting this education.

She was not yet twenty years old.

The Girl From the Coffee Plantation

When Kimlea opened its doors on 2nd March 1992, Veronica was among its first class of twenty-two girls; aged between 16 and 22, most of them primary school leavers, all of them from communities where the path forward was narrow and the resources were thin.

Veronica had finished secondary school. That made her one of the few. But secondary school in Riara, surrounded by coffee plantations, did not open many doors. Her parents' income from picking berries did not stretch to college fees. And so Veronica did what the situation required of her.

She found another way.

Every Saturday, she walked to Kimlea and worked in the school garden. That was how she paid her fees; not in shillings, but in hours. Weeding, tending, turning the soil, earning her place in that classroom one Saturday at a time.

During the week, she walked.

During the holidays, she picked coffee alongside her parents; fifteen shillings for 10 kilograms, and put whatever she earned toward her education.

She did not complain. She did not stop. She showed up.

What Kimlea Gave Her

Kimlea taught Veronica catering and home management; the practical, skilled,

dignified work of feeding people well, running a household with intention, building something from raw ingredients and discipline.

But it also gave her something harder to name.

A formation. A sense of herself as a woman with capability and purpose. The kind of inner grounding that does not disappear when the certificate is in hand, that travels with you, into your marriage, your community, your children, your work.

Veronica would spend the rest of her life finding out how far that formation could take her.

What She Built

The day Veronica finished her training at Kimlea, she started her business.

Cakes and mandazi, supplied to the kiosks in her neighbourhood. A small beginning. The kind of beginning that looks, from the outside, like not very much.

But Veronica understood margins. She understood customers. She understood that a small business, run with discipline, is not small at all, it is a foundation.

With her earnings, she supported her family. She paid for her younger siblings' education. She built a life from the skills she had walked 24 kilometres a day to acquire.

In 1994 she married Samuel; a photographer. Together they built a family of six children: two sons and four daughters.

And Veronica kept going.

The Woman She Became

The coffee plantation girl from Riara became the person her community turned to.

Active in her local church. Patron of the parish youth. The woman couples came to when their marriages were struggling; not because she had studied counselling, but because she had the kind of steadiness and wisdom that people recognize and walk toward.

She recognized that she could do more with the right tools. So she studied. A diploma in counselling. Equipped now with both formation and qualification, she became more effective, more sought-after, more present in the lives of the families around her.

And then something unexpected happened.

The position of local chief became vacant.

Everyone told Veronica to apply. She went for the interview six months pregnant with her sixth child, certain, she says, that the panel would not give the job to an expectant woman in what had always been a man's role.

They gave her the job.

When she asked whether she could take maternity leave in three months, they told her: if she is married, the most normal thing is to have children. Take your leave. Full salary. We will see you when you return.

Veronica became a local chief; a civil servant, a public authority, a woman in a role that had not been built for her, and she held it with the same quiet determination she had brought to every other room she had ever walked into.

Where She Is Now

Veronica's rental houses, six of them, built and completed, generate enough income to educate her children and feed her family. Two daughters and a son are in university. She registered to pursue her own degree in Business Administration.

She comes back to Kimlea regularly. We invite her to speak to our students, to stand in front of young women who are at the beginning of their own journeys and tell them what is possible.

At one graduation ceremony, she was our chief guest. The students and their parents listened to her story and were moved to silence, then to something louder. The girls looked at her the way girls look at someone who has shown them a version of themselves they had not yet imagined.

She is their role model. She is ours too.

What Her Story Means for Every Girl at Kimlea

Veronica did not walk 24 kilometres a day because she had no other choice.

She walked because she had already decided that the education at the end of those kilometres was worth every step.

That decision, made before she had any proof, before she could see the chief's office or the counselling diploma or the rental houses or the university enrolment, is the Kimlea decision.

The one every girl who comes through our doors makes in her own way, at her own cost, from her own starting point.

We do not give these girls their futures.

We give them the tools to build futures they have already decided to reach for.

Veronica reached for hers a long time ago.

She is still walking.

Kimlea Girls Technical Training Centre has been equipping women and girls in Kiambu, Kenya since 1992. We offer NITA-certified full-time courses, short courses through the Kimlea Business Centre, and vocational training designed for girls at every starting point.

Applications are accepted throughout the year.

Interviews every Monday at 8:00am.

📍 Limuru Road, Kiambu

📞 0727 294 110

✉️ info@kimlea.ac.ke

🌐 www.kimlea.ac.ke