SBS Trains 50 Directors of Community-Based Schools from Kibera Slums in Nairobi

Earlier this week, we trained 50 directors of Community-Based Schools from Kibera Slums in a Programme aimed at improving the financial literacy, entrepreneurship skills and business practices of the school owners and heads.

This training is a community service project initiated by the Enterprise Development Center, an arm of the SBS Executive Education department. This initiative is intended for an initial pilot target group of 50 community-based schools in Kibra and Langata Sub Counties, which are under the Alternative Primary Based Education & Training (APBET) education sub-sector, with the projected multiplier effect of replicating the initiative to other informal settlements in the County of Nairobi.

According to statistics from the Kenya Ministry of Education, Kibra Sub County has more than 54,840 school-going pupils hosted in the more than 200 community-based schools, most of which fall under Alternative Provision of Primary Based Education and Training (APBET), and the 4 government primary schools located on the immediate outskirts of these informal settlements, or slums. Of these pupils, 87 per cent are hosted by these community-based schools, while 21 per cent are hosted by the four government public schools.

For most of these APBET schools, the community contributes monthly or term participation which can be understood as fees. All their programmes have previously been donor financed, and this has enabled them to continue offering their integrated services to the children.

These schools have great visions and interventions targeted towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); SDG 1: No Poverty by 2030 and SDG 4: Quality Education for All by 2030. All the initial 50 schools in the SBS pilot training are already striving to provide safe learning spaces for children to access quality education, psycho-social support, and feeding to the children of the slums, despite the challenge of lack of self-sustenance capacity. It is these schools that the SBS training targets to intervene on and build their self-sustenance capacity and strengthen their business resilience against global crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

This initiative came about as a response to the presence of insufficient good financial literacy, insufficient entrepreneurship skills, and poor business practices within education–providing organizations with Social Missions in Kibera Slums. This has been occasioned by poor project design and implementation along with poor basic start-up management skills, leading to the reduced economy, efficiency, effectiveness, and over-dependence on donor aid and sponsorships. The training project proposes to:

• Build Financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and good business practices within the structures of the target Community-Based Schools (CBS)
• Develop and legitimize a socio-commercial model that empowers the organization to operate as a Business and generate more revenue
• To expand the financial capacity of the schools to generate surpluses, and meet the laid out pre-requisites for the available SME and MSME capital support, and reduce the dependency on traditional fundraising and charity support as the main sources of revenue support
• To mitigate the challenge of the inability of these schools to meet the requirements for registration with the Ministry of Education, along with the very stringent guidelines, which also translate into resources and capital

The Enterprise Development Center at Strathmore University Business School is dedicated to developing and empowering entrepreneurs running SMEs and MSMEs. Consequently, we offer an array of entrepreneurship courses designed to help entrepreneurs develop their entrepreneurship competencies as well as gain best practice insights to manage the growth of their business ventures.

Article by Juliet Hinga

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