A specific type of international development narrative is rarely adequately conveyed. There are no tearful photo ops, no dramatic helicopter drops of supplies, and no celebrity ambassadors. It’s the tale of committees being established, emails between teachers in sun-drenched Kenyan classrooms and drizzly English towns, and cuddly toys shipped across oceans as acts of kindness between preschools that could hardly be more dissimilar. That is the tale of OMEP UK and Kenya, and it merits greater attention than it currently receives.
The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, was founded in the wake of World War II as a means of uniting individuals from all over the world to support the rights of young children to care and education. The UK chapter has long been one of its most active national branches, supporting initiatives from South Africa to Nigeria, advocating at the UN, and advocating for the inclusion of early childhood development in global sustainability goals. However, its work in Kenya is unique, in part because Kenya was already doing something that very few other African nations had tried.
Kenya collaborated with the Van Leer Foundation in the early 1970s to construct the first national preschool infrastructure in Africa. In addition to creating curricula and training teacher trainers, the National Center for Early Childhood Education in Nairobi eventually secured the World Bank’s first-ever loan to an African nation for early childhood programming, totaling twenty-eight million dollars that increased preschool access for sixty percent of the population. Kenya had already made impressive progress by the time OMEP UK became more directly involved. What would happen next was the question.
The creation of the Kenya OMEP committee, which was backed by OMEP UK, is what actually happened next. This was more than a footnote for administration. Kenyan early childhood educators now have a permanent place at the international table thanks to the establishment of a formal national committee. This includes access to international research networks, UN policy advocacy channels, and formal partnerships with preschools and training facilities in the UK and elsewhere. It’s the kind of institutional scaffolding that, although it may seem uninteresting on paper, alters how policymakers view a nation’s youngest citizens.
Launched in 2012, the partnership between preschools in the UK and Kenya provides an insightful look at how these relationships function in practice. Initially, 32 preschools from the two nations were paired. The equator was traversed by stuffed animals. Blogs were established. Then reality set in: issues with freight, a high staff turnover rate in Kenyan schools, and communication breakdowns that are familiar to anyone who has attempted to coordinate across time zones and income disparities. In response, OMEP Kenya suggested moving away from institutional partnerships and toward direct connections between student teachers, assuming that younger educators who are accustomed to Facebook and digital tools would maintain relationships more organically. That change reflects an honest realization that good intentions by themselves are insufficient to overcome logistical challenges.
Although it is more difficult to quantify the wider ripple effects throughout East Africa, there is a perception that Kenya’s prominence as a preschool leader, enhanced by its OMEP membership and international advocacy connections, encouraged neighboring nations to take early education more seriously. The right to early childhood services was guaranteed by Kenya’s 2010 constitution. Early childhood education PhDs are now awarded by Kenyatta University. When creating their own systems, other East African countries refer to these accomplishments as benchmarks.
However, it’s important to recognize what is still lacking. Particularly for pastoralist and nomadic communities, access is uneven. A generation of parents were devastated by the HIV/AIDS crisis, creating educational gaps that cannot be filled by institutional partnerships alone. Target 4.2 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which calls for universal access to high-quality pre-primary education by 2030, was made possible thanks to the lobbying efforts of OMEP UK. It seems more and more unclear if that deadline will be met.
There isn’t a single dramatic moment that sticks out when you watch this story unfold over several decades. It is the result of a series of modest, unglamorous decisions, such as creating a committee, shipping toys, or reworking a partnership model after the initial iteration failed. Preschools in Dorchester and rural Kenya are very different from one another in practically every quantifiable aspect. It took more perseverance than ambition and more obstinacy than vision to bridge it. Perhaps the most valuable lesson hidden in this specific chapter of East African education is that.
