EDUCATION IS THE KEY

When our nations founding father, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, took over power after a lengthy
political and military struggle from the British way back in 1963, he set the country on yet
another journey of struggle against three issues that he considered as key to stabilizing the young
nation and setting it on a path of much needed development. In his first speech, during the
acceptance ceremony, he promised to fight poverty, ignorance and diseases.
The biggest chuck of the current population of the country is composed of individuals who, like
me, never got to see the founding president; my father was a toddler when we won
independence. Yet somehow, through national events, our teachers and an aggressive reading
culture, this key message has been able to pass on through the generations to reach us at our time
and at its greatest need. Poverty remains depressingly widespread, significantly more babies are
dying from malaria and other diseases and basic education for all has just remained but a pipe
dream.
As an individual, I understand that the path to fighting these vices is long and chock full of
hurdles, but am still optimistic that with the right education for our population, we will be able to
address a number of these issues way sooner than later. Some steps have been taken by our
successive governments to ensure the penetration of knowledge to all the corners of the country
is achieved. This has partly been motivated by the international declaration that education is a
human right and also partly by the realization that it can be used to empower people who then
can help the nation address the other challenges of poverty and diseases. As we speak, primary
education is free and compulsory for all school age going children in the country and secondary
school education has been heavily subsidized.
However, challenges still linger ranging from the quality of the education offered, choice of
study options provided and the patchy footprint of institutions of learning across the country.
Some regions still lag behind others when it comes to the number of schools per region and
teachers per school. This may be attributed to some traditional cultures that forbid modern
education, especially girl child education and also because of poor implementation of
government policy which has seen public schools distributed along political standings and
backings. This is very common in Africa.

Luckily, private institutions have managed to step in and fill some of the gaps that have been left
and it is through such an initiative that I found myself interacting with the administration of a
school in northern Kenya, deep inside Mandera County. This initiative, dubbed 47 in 1, aims to
build a computer laboratory for a single school in all the 47 counties of the country. It has been
championed and majorly executed by members of the Technology division of Safaricom limited
through the leadership of the division director, Mr. Thibaud Rerolle, who also happened to be the
brain child of the project. In a fashion similar to crowd sourcing, members of the division were
requested to nominate themselves to particular counties of their choice and raise the requisite
amounts of money by working as a team through charitable events and by partnering with
willing sponsors. The target was to raise about $16000 per county which would be used to
construct a solar powered computer laboratory for the primary school children.
This initiative in itself will provide an opportunity for the children to be introduced to the world
of computers and computing, which in the current world where almost everything is
computerized is a much needed skill. It is also a good response to the very low levels of
computer literacy in the country which lie below 50% (Source: World Bank Indicators, Rural
Poverty Portal: Kenya Statistics).
By committing my time and engineering skills towards this project, am most convinced that the
future of our children will be secured because they will gain the requisite knowledge for
purposes of self-development that would um up to an overall national growth. I am proud of the
efforts that we have made so far, however little, because I believe that they are the steps in the
right direction.