How Kenya Became the Strongest Education System in Africa
10 little-known moments that shaped history— from Kikuyu boycotts to Alliance, the Airlifts, Mau Mau & M-Pesa.
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In 2017, the World Economic Forum rated Kenya’s education system as the strongest on the African continent. In 2018, the World Bank ranked Kenya the top African country for education outcomes (1st out of 43 mainland countries). In 2019, a Kenyan was named the most outstanding teacher in the world and awarded a prestigious $1 million prize.
Clearly, something powerful is going on in Kenya’s schools. In 2018, I wrote about how Nairobi is a global hotspot for education innovation for BRIGHT Magazine; the past decade brought an exciting rise in education companies, nonprofits, and government reforms — with new schools like SHOFCO and Bridge, teacher training and coaching models like Dignitas, national efforts at scale like Tusome, and successful edtech start-ups like Eneza.
But telling only the story of the past decade leaves out the long history of how, over the past century, leaders laid the foundation for Nairobi to be an education hub. Although the pace of innovation accelerated since 2008, Kenya has been at the forefront of education reform since the 1920’s. This article shares ten moments that made Nairobi fertile ground for education innovation — across three areas of politics, demand, and innovation. This timeline shows them chronologically:
FORCE 1: POLITICS — All four Presidents prioritized education issues, using reforms to generate political goodwill or influence elections.
1. The Kikuyu Independent Schools Movement boycotted missionary schools.
Before becoming Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta was the principal of Kenya’s first teacher-training college. He was involved in the Kikuyu Independent Schools movement that started in 1929, when Kikuyu parents left missionary schools to create schools run by African teachers. The movement created over 60 schools that were alternatives to oppressive missionary education. These schools were shut down by the colonial administration in 1952, because it feared the schools were training students to be part of the Mau Mau uprising.
2. School attendance increased because of Free Primary Education, Harambee schools & Nyayo Milk.
Jomo Kenyatta became President of newly independent Kenya in 1963, and his government abolished fees for primary school grades 1–4 in 1974. Because of this Free Primary Education (FPE) policy, the number of Kenyan children enrolled in grade 1 nearly tripled from 1973 to 1974, from 379,000 959,000. Kenyatta also promoted the rise of Harambee secondary schools, based on the Kenyan self-help philosophy of a community fundraising to collectively solve their challenges. Between 1963 and 1978, Kenyan communities founded and built over 1,620 Harambee schools, which increased access to secondary.
While President from 1978 to 2002, Daniel arap Moi started Nyayo Milk, which distributed free milk to primary students across Kenya from 1978–1992 (twice weekly). One could argue that this was a way for Moi to build goodwill amongst young Kenyan citizens so that they would support his one-party state. One could also argue that Moi genuinely cared about access to education — as before becoming President, he was a student at a teacher training college and a teacher, was instrumental in the founding of Kenya’s largest teachers’ union in 1957, and served as Minister of Education in the pre-independence government of 1960–61. Regardless of Moi’s intention, Nyayo Milk did increase primary school attendance.
3. Free schools created overcrowding and led to the rise of low-cost private schools in the 2000's.
President Moi reinstated school fees in 1989 due to pressure from international financial institutions. During the 2002 election between Uhuru Kenyatta and Mwai Kibaki, Kibaki promised that he would implement Free Primary Education. Some argue that this pledge was a key factor in the election of Kibaki. When his coalition came into power in 2003, they abruptly abolished user fees for grades 1–8 and announced that all Kenyans of any age could enter into primary school.
FPE led to a crippling problem with overcrowding —as the student to teacher ratio changed from 31:1 in 2002 to 40:1 in 2003. Because the school year began only a few weeks after the election, officials in the Department of Education had only a few weeks to come up with a plan for implementation. FPE also led to a rise in families choosing to send their children to low-cost private schools. Many families perceived that quality in government schools was dropping; those who could afford to, fled to attend private schools. For example, over 60 percent of children in Nairobi’s informal settlements attend low-cost private preschools and primary schools; this shows that low-income families in Kenya choose to prioritize their spending on school fees, and is a reason private schools in Kenya are pressured to innovate in order to compete in the market.
4. A learning crisis and the 2013 election led to free laptops and reforms to the national curriculum.
Uwezo’s nationwide assessments, from 2009 to 2015, showed “no significant improvement in learning outcomes” of literacy and numeracy in children across Kenya. During the 2013 election, President Uhuru Kenyatta pledged that he would try to address this learning crisis by distributing free laptops to class one students through the Digital Literacy Program. Once elected, Kenyatta made education one of his priorities, with the mandate for sweeping changes and progressive national reforms. He catalyzed a massive effort to transform the curriculum for primary and secondary schools to focus on competencies and practical skills for work. Some critics argue that these efforts have been rushed and rife with problems, but the fact that these reforms are happening is undoubtedly a positive step.
FORCE 2: DEMAND — As missionaries & entrepreneurs created new schools & scholarships, this made Kenyans place a high value on education.
5. Missionary schools expanded access for Kenyans but maintained colonial power.
Missionaries opened the first school in Kenya near Mombasa in 1848 and numerous other schools in the early 1900’s. After Britain colonized Kenya in 1895, many whites moved there because the colonial administration gave them cheap land to farm, stolen from Kenyan tribes. Missionary schools were used as a tool to oppress the local African population, so that white settlers could maintain their power over Kenya. Across all missionary schools, only European and Asian students were taught academic skills; Kenyans were taught to work in industries, agriculture, or the colonial administration. Schools were even used to overtly brainwash students; for example, Starehe was founded in 1959 to “rehabilitate” youth suspected of supporting the Mau Mau resistance. It later evolved into a free school for low-income youth, but its genesis was clearly to stop the growth of Kenyan resistance to colonialism.
Missionary schools were slow to evolve. But one positive step was that in 1926, Protestant missionaries opened Alliance High School, the first school in Kenya to offer a full secondary education to black Africans. (It was the first to allow them to take Cambridge exams, which were necessary to progress to universities). Many Alliance alumni went on to become leaders in Kenya’s post-independent government, businesses, or civil society (such as author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o). This was a precursor for groundbreaking schools that would emerge later in Kenya.
6. The African Airlifts trained Black leaders to guide post-independence Kenya.
To prepare a cohort of leaders to guide Kenya after independence, the Kenyan activist Tom Mboya mobilized the African Airlifts in 1959. With financial support from numerous American leaders and politicians, the Airlifts brought hundreds of East Africans to study at universities in the United States. Many would go on to become high-profile leaders in Kenya — such as Wangari Maathai, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize — or in the post-independence government, such as Barack Obama’s father, an economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance. The Airlifts helped to inculcate the belief in many Kenyans that investing in education could be the ticket to a better life. This was important because prior to the Airlifts, the colonial education system produced only a few hundred secondary students and fewer than a dozen university graduates — most of whom had to go abroad because the first university in Kenya, University of East Africa (later re-named to University of Nairobi) only opened in 1956. The Airlifts created a precedent for the many scholarship programs that would come later to send Kenyans to school, like Wings to Fly.
7. A wave of private schools launched to serve the middle-class/wealthy & deepen inequality.
In the wake of Kenya’s independence in 1963, to meet the needs of the country’s growing middle class, pioneering Kenyan entrepreneurs founded some of the first high-quality schools for middle class children anywhere in Africa. Two of the most prominent were Dr. Mary Okelo of Makini Schools (1978) and Dr. Eddah Gachukia of Riara Schools (1983).
A wave of high-fee schools also launched to serve children of a growing group of wealthy Kenyan businessmen and politicians, along with foreign diplomats and aid workers. These included Hillcrest (1965), Banda School (1966), Rosslyn Academy (1967), International School of Kenya (1976), and Brookhouse (1981). Nairobi is the home of many embassies and development agencies, and is the Africa HQ for the UN; many of these agencies pay school fees for children of their staff, which is part of why there is a high capacity to pay for expensive schools in Nairobi. This rise of high- and mid-fee schools is similar to what emerged in other African cities post-independence. But what set Kenya’s system apart was the way that Kenyans placed such a high value on education, which caused school fees to rise in comparison to other African countries. For example, in comparison to Cape Town’s schools (known as some of the most expensive in Africa), Nairobi’s fees are nearly 66% more; the most expensive school in Kenya is nearly $30,000 per year. The rise of these high-fee schools helped to create high inequality in Kenya, where a small portion of the population has access to high-quality services while a third of Kenyans live on $2 a day.
FORCE 3: INNOVATION — Nairobi has a long tradition of disrupting the status quo and entrepreneurship, which made it a breeding ground for education entrepreneurs.
8. Mobile money & the Silicon Savannah accelerated the growth of edtech companies.
In the early 2000’s, Nairobi emerged as a tech entrepreneurship hotspot and breeding ground for edtech innovation. M-Pesa, a game-changing mobile money platform, launched in 2007, and fiber-optic cables and high-speed internet arrived in 2009. These led to the booming Silicon Savannah; Nairobi is the main hub for tech innovation across Sub-Saharan Africa. It is headquarters to continent leaders like M-KOPA and IBM Research Africa, and home to successful Kenyan entrepreneurs like Samuel Gikandi of Africa’s Talking and Ken Njoroge of Cellulant. As a result, Nairobi was an attractive place for edtech companies to launch because they could use the M-Pesa platform for payments and take advantage of high cell phone use amongst Kenyans. For example, Bridge Academies started in Kenya in 2009 and raised over $140 million from investors like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Eneza started in Nairobi in 2011 and grew to have over 6 million users across three countries.
9. Investors, spaces & serendipitous networking accelerated the growth of education entrepreneurs.
In addition to Nairobi’s tech ecosystem, it has a strong support network for entrepreneurs, which was another reason so many education entrepreneurs founded companies and nonprofits there. Many formal structures exist to support entrepreneurs in Kenya, including dozens of accelerators, support networks, and co-working spaces like the iHub, Metta, and Nairobi Garage; in a ranking of the cities in the world with the most co-working spaces, Nairobi was 17th globally with 106 spaces. Nairobi has many events, such as Sankalp, the main annual conference for impact investors and entrepreneurs in Africa (started in 2014). And it has an increasing number of programs to support education entrepreneurs, specifically, such as monthly Edtech Meetups and the Metis Fellowship.
More importantly, Nairobi has a particularly dense community of investors and entrepreneurs, which speeds up informal networking and knowledge-sharing between entrepreneurs. Because many start-up staff and investors live and work within a few miles (within Kilimani/Westlands), there is a high density of innovators concentrated in close proximity to one another. They often bump into each other at a set of coffee shops, restaurants, and bars frequented by start-up leaders (such as Kesh Kesh, Connect Coffee, and Le Grenier à Pain) — which leads to serendipitous sharing of ideas and connections that lead to innovation. As a testament to this, Nairobi was ranked the most innovative city in Africa and the Middle East in 2016. Innovation experts talk about the “adjacent possible”, and this existed in Nairobi — a place where innovations emerging from fintech led to more edtech companies and school chains launching there.
10. Social movements created a culture of Kenyans mobilizing together to create change.
Media have often covered the recent rise of Nairobi as a hub for tech innovation, but this did not happen in a vacuum. Nairobi’s entrepreneurship ecosystem builds on a long legacy of Kenyans coming together to solve their problems through activism since the 1950's — which laid a critical foundation for a web of education leaders and entrepreneurs to emerge from 2007 to today. These include:
- The Mau Mau uprising from 1952, led by Dedan Kimathi and others, helped catalyze Kenya’s independence in 1963 (more about Britain’s brutal suppression of this resistance in Imperial Reckoning).
- The Harambee Movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, where communities came together for pooled resources and collective action.
- The Green Belt Movement, launched in 1977 by Wangari Maathai, which protected the environment and protested for the government to release political prisoners and increase democratic rights.
- Ushahidi, co-founded by Ory Okolloh in 2008, crowdsourced and tracked post-election violence.
More than many other cities in the Global South, Kenya has a long history of activists standing up for what they believe in and protesting. These activists made Nairobi a place where leaders can disrupt the status quo in education, whether by creating a progressive reform in government policies, a learning app, or a new school model.
Kat Pattillo writes about education reform and innovation across the Global South. She is currently studying how social movements accelerate systems change in education, through an MPhil in Politics at Oxford. Kat previously consulted as a researcher and facilitator, taught at African Leadership Academy in South Africa, and co-founded Metis in Kenya. For more of her writing, follow her on LinkedIn or sign up for the EdWell newsletter.
