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.

THE VALUES WE LIVE BY

Our MISSION

KEY’s mission is to immediately and directly equip students with the global competencies needed to meet the demands of the 21st century.

These efforts align with national education goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which underscores the obligation to promote children’s rights to health, education, and protection while expanding opportunities for them to thrive.

  1. Access for all

    Our vision is to ensure every school-aged child has access to a library packed with current, captivating, and impactful resources—because it is key to a child’s development and potential, regardless of the child’s background.

  2. Foster Responsible Citizenship

    We promote the use of the library as a place to practice democratic rights and values and good governance. We encourage its use as a forum for collaborative learning, freedom of expression, self-discovery and personal development.

  3. Aligning Libraries with National Objectives

    We ensure our measures align with national interests, education syllabuses, and the country’s development programs. By designing libraries as unifying resources, we bring together communities, authorities, and educators. This collaborative approach strengthens the push to integrate libraries as a mandatory feature in all schools  

RESEARCH

KEY’s library program is results oriented. We look to the best practices of successful education programs from around the world to hone our methods and use our resources as effectively as possible. Always an ongoing process, we also monitor relevant journals, news outlets and professional opinions for the latest developments and findings in our field. While this information does not necessarily shift our policies or program development, it does help in refining the KEY strategy and approach.