Our Impact
No child writes “I love maths” by accident.
She wrote it because somebody showed her Exploding Dots — the Global Math Project lesson that a share of every Kan journey pays for, in the village schools at the edge of the parks we drive.
Global Math Week, a primary school on the Karatu road
Why Maths
We fund the one subject that decides every subject after it.
A guide’s licence, a ranger’s posting, a pilot’s seat, a camp manager’s ledger, a vet tech’s dosage chart — every job the northern circuit creates sits on the far side of a maths exam. It is the subject that quietly decides which doors a child in Karatu or Mto wa Mbu will be allowed to walk through, and it is the subject most likely to convince them, at nine years old, that they are simply not clever.
So we do not fund maths as charity. We fund it because tourism that takes a landscape’s beauty and leaves its children innumerate is not conservation. It is extraction with better vehicles.
What Exploding Dots has done so far
7.8M
Students and teachers reached
150+
Countries and territories
2005
Year Exploding Dots was written
96%
Teachers who say maths got easier
Global Math Project figures, counted since the first Global Math Week in 2017.
Where the money goes
Three steps, and none of them are a photograph of a cheque.
01
A share is taken off the top
5% of every booking is set aside the day it is confirmed — before we pay a park fee, a fuel bill or a guide. It is a cost of running Kan, not a donation we make when the season has been kind.
02
The school at the gate signs up
We start with the head teachers in the villages we drive past twice a week. The money buys Exploding Dots training for their maths teachers, printed materials in Kiswahili, exercise books, and the fuel to get a trainer out to them.
03
October arrives
During Global Math Week every one of those classrooms does the same lesson as millions of children in more than 150 countries, on the same days. A child in Mto wa Mbu and a child in Montreal, working the identical problem.
- 5%Of every booking
- 14Schools on the programme
- 61Teachers trained
- 3,200Children in those classrooms
The children at the gate are the ones who decide what happens to the crater.
The Long Game
Every guide in our fleet was once a child at a village desk.
The northern circuit does not import its people. The guide who finds you a leopard in Seronera grew up an hour from the gate; so did the ranger who counts the rhino and the woman who runs the camp’s books. The industry recruits from exactly the classrooms we are funding, which means the return on a maths lesson here is measured in careers, not in gratitude.
It is the slowest thing we do and the only one that outlasts us. A vehicle wears out in six seasons. A child who believes she is good at numbers does not.
Come and see it
Book the safari. The maths lesson comes with it.
Every itinerary we run carries the same share, whether you travel for eight days or eighteen. Ask a specialist which schools sit on your route — on most of them, you will drive past the classroom.