WE’RE AN AWARD-WINNING DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM YIELDING RAPID REWARDS
Knowledge Empowering Youth (KEY) is a registered charity in both Canada and Kenya. We are the first turnkey public school library program in Kenya, dedicated to giving every school-aged child access to books.
Over 17 years, many of our 46 libraries have earned national and international recognition for raising education standards in government and low-cost private schools. Our school libraries are spread across six of Kenya’s eight regional provinces and 13 counties. We have replicated our turnkey model in a Tanzanian village near Barrick Gold Corp’s Buzwagi mine and in a Ghanaian village near the Nsuta Manganese Mine in the Tarkwa region, operated by the Ghana Manganese Company Limited (GMC).
In 2016, KEY spearheaded a collaboration between the Kenya Law Reform Commission, Kenya National Library Services, the Library Association, Kenyatta University, Technical University of Kenya, the Ministries of Education and Sports, Culture and the Arts, the Goethe-Institut Kenya, the World Bank, and a wide range of educational NGOs (including Book Aid International, eKitabu, Storymoja, and Worldreader) to draft Kenya’s first policy and guidelines for school libraries. Together, we built a national framework, policy document, and road map to establish tens of thousands of new libraries in Kenya. This collaboration laid the foundation for the comprehensive Draft National Policy on Libraries (2022) and the Draft Libraries of Kenya Bill, now undergoing public participation.