Jacaranda Beach Resort has been a part of this time in Watamu not only synonymous with tourism and hospitality, with the beauty of its sea and the quality of its services, but especially for the local population is becoming more and more Reference to aid, development and social background initiatives.
The Italian management of the resort just outside Watamu and close to small rural and poor realities, such as Mbarakachembe, Kijwetanga, Jikoke, Digirikani, Karaweni can not close its eyes in the face of the situation just outside the structure and that even the Tourists intuit upon arrival and during their excursions.
In addition, many of the resort's employees come from those villages and their families live in that reality.
For this some years ago, in 2010, everything started with the Jacaranda Nursery School in Jikoke, the first village to go to Watamu.
Then an even bigger project, the Jacaranda Primary School that has recently been restored and expanded with the addition of toilets. Today, elementary schools can accommodate 520 children.
In this period of extraordinary drought, just mitigated by the first monsoon rains, Jacaranda's help from the neighboring villagers for water supply is almost crucial. In Digirikani, a small community near Barakachembe, a pipeline was built that directly connects to Mawasco's supply and installed a cistern. First, the women in the village had to walk for at least a kilometer to fill the various cans. Also in another small hut agglomeration near Jikoke, Karaweni, a 2 km pipeline is located to connect public water directly to the community. Particularly important, these are all jobs for which the materials have been purchased directly and people paid for the workers themselves, no funds allocated were wasted by leaving it in hand to third parties.
Now, for a specific request from some locals, the Jacaranda group will be building two churches: a fundraiser will start soon to fund the construction of a new Catholic Church of the Holy Ghost. The current one is very small. The project, of several million shillings, features a church on the model of St Francis Xavier in Malindi. A smaller project, however, which will be financed directly by the resort, concerns a small church to be built ex novo for the Jikoke community. It will be called St. Mark and the planned spending is two million Kenyan shillings.
In order to close off some of the praiseworthy initiatives, Mbarakachembe continues to sponsor the local football team, the "Chembe Football Club".