The educational landscape is changing rapidly in Kenya and Uganda. More young people are in secondary school than ever before. The purpose of this funding is to encourage and support our partner schools to develop and pilot new ideas. These pilots, as well as making an impact in their own right, will keep EPAfrica's programme vigorous and will ensure that our partnerships with schools continue to evolve, our investments are relevant and together we achieve the best possible outcome for students.
In Kenya and Uganda, more young people are in secondary school than ever before. Changes to the national funding model have proved a mixed blessing. Both countries are in the process of finalising new syllabi that will be implemented over the coming years, and in Kenya there is even talk of changing the number of years that students spend at secondary school, and the structure of the qualifications they sit.
Our innovation pilots will provide schools with 200 to test a new project idea that is new to EPAfrica or new to that school environment. The purpose of this seed funding is to encourage and support the development of new ideas, to keep our programme vigorous and ultimately to keep us relevant and evolving to achieve the best possible outcomes with our partners. We will prioritise ideas with exciting potential that we and our partners can learn from and that could become common practice.
Our investments empower schools to provide a quality education for their young people. We enable talented university students in the UK to experience grassroots international development and provide them with the awareness, knowledge and skills to become leaders of the future. These funds will enable us to expand to a fourth project site in Iganga, Uganda, to annually recruit 75+ volunteers from more UK universities and to grow to work with 30 schools a year, reaching 15,000 students.
