Eunice Marindany

Bold Question: How might we leverage school support staff to help learners to explore and fulfill their potential?

Path to Metis: The journey through a rural life with FGM, early marriages, and lack of education for a girl child gave Eunice a burden in her heart to work hard in school to one day have a career. Several years later, many youth just like Eunice are still unemployed. This is not because they did not go to school but because they graduated with low grades and limited skills to help them create jobs for themselves.

Eunice’s passion for assisting youth is driven by the high rate of unemployment in Kenya that youth face today. Therefore, she has engaged in developing young entrepreneurs at M-Pesa Foundation Academy in Thika. Eunice does pastoral care by giving day to day support to learners. She also serves in the Entrepreneurship and Leadership department where she is a volunteer mentor to business groups of students making hand-crafted items. She helps train these students and gives them an opportunity to make, market, and sell their items.

Eunice advocates for non-teaching staff to support learners in skills training and share their knowledge from their expert fields, even if they are not a classroom teacher. Eunice believes that entrepreneurship education cultivates talents that drives the future of development. She believes that problem solving, critical thinking, job creation as well as new product creation comes as a result of entrepreneurial skills and other life skills passed on to learners. She advocates for schools to build entrepreneurial curriculum that can be used by teachers to train learners.

Eunice also knows that women drive change in the community if they are empowered. That is why she engages women in her rural home in small and medium enterprises famously known as “Chamaas”. She is a member of the KIVA leading community since 2010, where she actively lends to women in business in Kenya and other nations. Her dream is to empower graduates with skills that will help them create jobs for themselves and others.

More About Eunice: LinkedIn