The main issues in the Kenyan education sector are identified by the Yetu Elimu coalition, which serves as the national education coalition (NEC) of Kenya. The issues include challenges of general access and retention, gender disparities, inclusion, and education financing. The provision of quality education is further challenged by the inadequate number and poor distribution of teachers, leading to low teacher pupil ratios, as well as inadequate infrastructure and learning materials. 

The project is seeking to address some of these substantial challenges, by enhancing civil society engagement in gender responsive education system transformation processes. To achieve this, the Elimu Yetu Coalition will work towards increasing CSO participation and monitoring of government education programmes and policy processes, increase opportunities for collaborative learning among CSOs for enhanced participation and influence gender responsive education transformation processes, and improve the institutional capacity of the NEC to engage in policy processes.  

The project is building on efforts made in the previous project phase, where focus was to promote inclusive civil society engagement in policy spaces, and consolidate civil society gains towards participation in gender responsive education planning process. This time around the focus will still be on inclusive civil society engagement and gender responsive education planning processes but will be expanded to also cover transformation processes, hereunder development, implementation, and monitoring of education policies.  

The main project activities will include:

• Holding engagement forums with policy makers, and gender responsive county dialogue forums to review education policies.  

• Engage with the Ministry of Education to develop inclusive policies on ICT  

• Conducting and attending learning forums at national, regional, and subregional levels. 

• Produce and compile an annual status report on education. 

• Generate and disseminate key evidence on education. 

• Conduct budget tracking exercises at county level. 

• Mobilise CSOs representing marginalised groups to join the coalition. 

The use of evidence to inform decision making processes will lead to sound decision making in the sector and will positively affect education management in the country. By addressing gender issues at the community level, a change of attitude and behaviour in the communities is made possible, and Elimu Yetu will be able to promote equal opportunities to boys’ and girls’ access to education. By actively engaging the youth in education activities their future of making education matters will be sustained beyond the project phase. 

A previous phase of the project was carried out between April 2022 – December 2023. The current project is part of the EOL extension phase of 2024-2026. Read more about the previous phase of the project here.