With the issue of basic education now being adequately addressed by the Kenya Government, attention is currently turning to secondary and post-secondary school education system. Lack of sufficient financing and adequate facilities’ facing most secondary schools and other higher institutions of education is still a major handicap in their main goal of providing competitive and quality education. This has led to a situation where some regions endowed with better-equipped public secondary schools and the mushrooming high cost private academies tend to excel in national examinations in comparison to regions with poor secondary school system. These regional disparities are more pronounced in some provinces like Nyanza, which is now lagging far behind.

The project the Integrated Development Africa Programme (IDAP) is pursuing is an integrated system comprising of four major components, first and the major component involves the setting up of a Girls Secondary School Education Endowment Scholarship Fund Programme (EESFP) to urgently avail financial resources to enable extremely poor, orphaned, and vulnerable girls to access quality secondary school education.

The second component involves the setting up of as many as possible day time School Holiday Tuition Centers Programme (SHTCP) in Siaya County to offer extra tuition in Mathematics and Science Subjects, areas where girls have traditionally performed poorly over the years. The tuition will be conducted during the school recess period in April, August and December. The third subcomponent involves the use of women elite from Western region and other areas in a Girls’ Mentorship Programme (GMP) where the ladies will be role models for the young schoolgirls.

The fourth component involves the use of HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Diseases Awareness Campaigns Programme (HACP) to target young girls in schools, and during sports meetings, drama, and music festivals. The last and also most important is that IDAP will collaborate with other Community Based Organizations (CBOs) to provide sanitary pads for girls who skip school when they are going through menstruation (the monthly process of discharging blood and other matter from the womb that occurs between puberty and menopause in women and female primates who are not pregnant), this is commonly known as monthly periods.

The fifth and last component deals with youth skilling and employability. Here we recognize that youth unemployment is one of the most pressing challenges facing underprivileged communities. To address this, our Youth Skilling and Employability Program is designed to equip young people with the practical skills, knowledge, and opportunities they need to secure meaningful employment or start their own businesses.

We focus on building the capacity of youth to thrive in a rapidly evolving job market by partnering with relevant stakeholders in offering market-relevant programs like hospitality, hairdressing and beauty therapy, plumbing and electrical installation, mentorship, and linkages to employment and entrepreneurship pathways. The emphasis shall be on modularized and Dual-TVET training models in line with government Competency Based Education and Training (CBET) framework.