On November 26, 2014, a dozen people gathered at the campus of Spire Education in Nairobi, Kenya. They listened to Kago Kagichiri speak about how Eneza Education was building a mobile learning model, and Jay Larson share how Tunapanda Institute was training youth in informal settlements with tech skills. Over beer and samosas, they spoke to one another about the education initiatives they were building — schools, apps, skills trainings. They shared ideas, contacts, and advice. This was the first ever Nairobi Education Technology (EdTech) Meetup.
The group would later grow to have over 2,500 people, but that first night was a critical moment in history. It marked the decade when Nairobi became a hub for education innovation.
Throughout human history, certain cities have accelerated innovation around specific topics at particular moments. Take Athens in the 5th to 3rd centuries B.C., with Socrates and the Agora, Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, the rise of democracy, and the birth of philosophy. London coffeehouses in the 18th century and the birth of the Enlightenment. Paris cafés in the 1940s, with Picasso, Camus, and the birth of existentialism. Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 80s, with the Homebrew Computer Club, Stanford University, and the birth of the personal computer and the internet. In these places, people gathered to share ideas and reimagine the future.
Nairobi is at such a moment in time. Within an area of roughly 60 square miles, there are thousands of education entrepreneurs and their teams, innovative school leaders and teachers, foundations and development agencies, and visionary policy-makers who are building and funding the future of education. They are creating change in private schools, education technology, and the public system — from preschools, primary and secondary schools, up to vocational training and universities. I interviewed hundreds of leaders across this ecosystem, and one thing is clear: the past decade brought an unprecedented wave of education innovation to Nairobi.
Evidence shows that this movement is a lighthouse for other African nations to learn from. According to the World Bank’s new Human Capital Index, launched in October 2018, Kenya is ranked 1st out of 43 African countries for education outcomes (tied with Algeria, and not counting the islands of Seychelles and Mauritius). For anyone across the world who is interested in education reform, Nairobi is a case study for how to accelerate innovation and reforms in an urban education system. What happened in the city over the past decade holds important lessons for all of us.
AAlthough education reforms have been emerging in Kenya since the 1920s, the past decade has brought a surge of education innovations to Nairobi. There were three trends that helped this along.
The first is that a wave of entrepreneurs launched new school models. Nairobi was the birthplace of two of Africa’s most acclaimed school chains, both darlings of international donors and investors. In 2009, Bridge International Academies launched their first-ever school in Nairobi; backed by prominent investors such as Omidyar Network and Bill Gates, the founders raised over $140 million and grew it to be one of the world’s largest school chains. In the same year, SHOFCO launched their first school for girls in Kibera; the founders were recently awarded the $2 million Hilton Humanitarian Prize for their groundbreaking model of leadership academies for girls linked to health and community services.
Over the following few years, other entrepreneurs launched new private school models at every level of the education system. These included primary and secondary schools — such as GEMS in 2012, Vale School in 2014 and Nova Pioneer in 2016 — and vocational skills training — such as AkiraChix in 2010, ADMI in 2011 and Moringa School in 2014 — to name just a few. Their fees range from free to over $20,000. They iterated innovations such as scripted lessons, blended learning, character development, and experiential learning through apprenticeships.
At the same time, many entrepreneurs who had fewer resources launched low-cost private schools, with more traditional teaching models. Evidence shows that over 60 percent of children in Nairobi’s informal settlements attend these types of preschools and primary schools, which typically have basic infrastructure such as tin roofs, books shared between students, and little to no access to WiFi. Entrepreneurs built pioneering models to support the communities who founded these schools (often churches or religious groups), by training leaders and teachers — including Dignitas in 2008, Tiny Totos in 2012 and Kidogo in 2014.
The second trend is that entrepreneurs reimagined the traditional classroom entirely, to offer children and adults alternative models for learning through EdTech. In 2011, Eneza Education launched and became an anchor of the EdTech ecosystem, sponsoring Edtech Meetups and reaching over 380,000 active users each month. Dozens of others followed, including eLimu in 2012, Arifu in 2015, and M-Shule in 2016. These companies built new models for students to learn through mobile phones, tablets, and apps — with digital content, gamified learning, and personalized learning driven by artificial intelligence. They rode the wave of investors around the world who were excited about the potential for EdTech to enable learning at a low cost and massive scale.
The third trend is that alongside this innovation in the private sector, many leaders worked to reform Nairobi’s public education system. These included visionary Kenyan entrepreneurs committed to supporting public primary schools — such as Wawira Njiru, who launched Food4Education in 2011 to deliver low-cost feeding programs, and Peggy Mativo, who launched PACE in 2012 to provide teaching assistants. They also included development agencies. In 2015, Dr. Ben Piper led partners including USAID, RTI, and the Kenyan government to build Tusome, a new teacher training model in which coaches supported every public primary school in the country to deliver stronger literacy education. The reform impacted over 7 million children and is widely seen as a success story for USAID. And during the 2013 election, President Uhuru Kenyatta pledged that he would launch a flagship education reform, the Digital Literacy Program, to distribute free laptops to students in public schools.
Most importantly, in 2014, Kenya’s Ministry of Education began a historic process of reforming the country’s national curriculum to focus on 21st century skills. Officials in the Ministry of Education increasingly spoke in public forums about how Kenya’s education system was too focused on rote memorization towards outdated high-pressure exams. Visionary leaders in the government’s curriculum reform agency, such as Julius Jwan and Sara Ruto, working with partners such as Educate!, developed a list of core competencies and began piloting the new curriculum in January 2018.
The reform process is complex and the quality of implementation has been widely criticized. But the reforms hold exciting potential and are being watched closely by Kenyans — often making front page news — and people around the world. UNESCO wrote a case study on the curriculum reform process, and innovators received huge amounts of funding to support their partnerships with the Kenyan government — Educate! received a large grant from IKEA Foundation and Food4Education was backed by Mulago Foundation and Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, two of the world’s most prestigious funders of social entrepreneurs. The reforms have a great deal of momentum and are an important sign of the Kenyan government’s commitment to systems change.
Despite Nairobi’s successes as a hub for education innovation, there still remain serious challenges that need to be addressed if the city is to become a true lighthouse for education reform.
The first is that the system is still not improving over time. In comparison to other African countries, Kenya’s education system is relatively high quality. Kenya has reached close to universal enrollment in primary school, and in 2017, the World Economic Forum rated Kenya’s education system as the strongest on the African continent. However, evidence suggests that this rise in access is still not leading to ongoing systems change. Uwezo’s nationwide assessments, from 2009 to 2015, showed “no significant improvement in learning outcomes” of literacy and numeracy in children across Kenya. Despite all the education entrepreneurs, EdTech innovation, and government reforms happening in Nairobi — the city is still not moving the needle over time on learning outcomes for all children.
Inequity is another issue. Nairobi’s education system is still largely segregated based on class and income levels. The quality of a child’s school is typically determined by the amount of fees their parent is able to pay (or if they’re lucky, they are selected for a scholarship). On one end, children who attend government primary schools for free sit in over-crowded classrooms and are likely to drop out with few skills to find and keep a job. On the other end, children who attend high-fee private schools have world-class science labs, a shot at Ivy League universities, and a ticket into Kenya’s elite. This kind of segregated school system is no different from many deeply divided societies around the world, such as the United States — but Nairobi’s system will truly have changed when there is greater access to opportunity, regardless of a child’s background.
Finally, although the reforms in government have high potential, the reality is that the regulatory environment still makes any innovation and partnerships with government difficult. A complex constellation of stakeholders have power and entrenched interests in Nairobi’s education system. Dozens of government bodies oversee everything from curriculum design, to teacher training and salaries, training of principals, exams, and tablets in schools. While the national level oversees primary and secondary, the county level oversees ECD and a separate body oversees vocational training — not to mention the teachers unions, school associations, and parents who hold tremendous power. There are government officials whose roles can be shifted at a moments notice, many layers of bureaucracy, and corruption in some public institutions (such as alleged corruption in the government’s laptops initiative). Navigating all of these moving parts and dynamics is often a difficult process for anyone trying to change part of the system. Innovative leaders and entrepreneurs are faced with constant delays — and too often, government regulation is more of a roadblock than an enabler to innovation.
These are the kinds of entrenched challenges that design theorists say are part of a “wicked problem” — and they have everything to do with Nairobi’s unique political and historical context. Solving these wicked problems will require leaders across Nairobi’s ecosystem to come together and co-create solutions. These problems are too complex for any one stakeholder to solve alone. The nonprofit I co-founded, Metis, piloted ways to do this — through a Fellowship program and hub space — and over the past four years, the Edtech Meetups have been testing ways to do this as well. We need to grow these efforts.
Nairobi has the conditions for collective impact to emerge. But transforming Nairobi’s education system will require more of what occurred with a dozen people in that room at Spire four years ago — leaders coming together to learn from one another. Like any social movement, it will require communities to organize and write a new vision for what’s possible.
The next chapter in the city’s history will be exciting to watch. It has implications not only for Nairobi’s children, but for education systems across the world.
Read more from our series on Equity in International Education.
