Lindah Cherop

Bold Question: How might we create market-driven curriculums for skills development across Kenya?

Path to Metis: Lindah is a curious soul who has an interest in learning and developing new ideas to problem solve around youth unemployment and ineffective skills training. Her journey into skills development began when her professor seeing her passion for training, recommended her for a capacity building development program in sustainable agricultural land management practices for small holder farmers. She held a position of Training Lead responsible for designing curriculum, reviewing content and training of trainers. In this role, together with her team members, she was able to impact 2,500 small holder farmers across the Lake Basin region of Kenya.

Over the last 8 years, Lindah has worked extensively in Sub-Saharan Africa in low income and politically volatile locations to improve the relevance and quality of technical and vocational skills training that leads to gainful employment or job creation through different interventions. Her engagements have made her experience the paradox of skills training across Africa from technical training classrooms that are poorly equipped but with hopeful and resilient teachers and learners to public technical vocational colleges with state of art modern learning equipment, but which lack teachers with the capacity to instruct and use the modern equipment.

Lindah has had up close and personal conversations with youth who have transcended their dire socio-economic situation to improve their livelihoods through learning a trade and eventually meaningfully participating in the labour market earning a livable income. On the other hand, she has encountered youth who have had their hopes of better living crushed due to attaining technical training that is not accredited and certified, hence not recognized in the labour market. Yet through this myriad of challenges, Lindah sees hope and better days to come for the skills sector in Kenya and Africa. In the past year, Lindah has become pollyanna about the possible opportunities’ artificial intelligence, hospitality and agriprenuership may bring to the Kenyan youth.