A Partnership Proposal for Kenya's Education-to-Employment Transition
Njia is a free, open career-pathway platform for Kenyan school leavers. It lists 1367 courses at 216 institutions across 47 counties, with entry grades, fees and — unusually — a column saying where each fee figure came from.
This proposal sets out the case for partnership: what the platform does, the evidence behind it, what it deliberately refuses to claim, and where support would go.
Download the proposal (PDF, 2.5 MB)
What partnership looks like
Njia is free to every learner who uses it and intends to stay that way, so it is funded from the institutional side rather than the student side. Four routes, in the order they tend to fit:
- County and institutional deployment. Kenya's National Policy Framework on Career Guidance (2023) names career information as one of five thematic areas needing resourcing, and most county education offices have no career-information system at all. Njia already holds one, per county, with the provision analysis to show where the gaps are.
- Data licensing. The catalogue is published free as CSV and JSON and will remain so. What is licensable is the work around it: bespoke extracts, a re-verification cadence against a named cycle, and provenance auditing for organisations that need to cite the figures rather than browse them.
- Programme and research funding. The county provision analysis is the finding most likely to change how money is allocated, and it is published in full rather than held back for a pitch.
- Institution listings. An institution may pay to have its provision listed and kept current. It buys presence and accuracy, nothing else — see below.
Why this is worth funding
The figures below are the platform's own, read from the published dataset and from the sourced labour-market record that ships with it — KNEC 2025 KCSE results (released 9 January 2026) and KUCCPS 2025/26 placement reporting, cross-reported August 2026.
- 993,226 KCSE candidates sat the 2025 exam, and most choose what comes next with no data-driven way to decide.
- Capacity is not the constraint. Middle-level colleges can hold 1,132,531 students. Placements across all institution types totalled 293,869 — roughly a quarter of the room available. The places exist; what is missing is a way to find them, price them and pay for them.
- 72.82% of candidates are not competing for degrees at all. 270,715 reached the C+ needed for direct university entry. Everyone else is choosing among diplomas, certificates and artisan courses — the tier career guidance in Kenya covers worst.
Five ways to partner
The four routes above are how Njia is funded. These are the five relationships that actually move the number, and most of them cost nothing:
- Schools. Embed Njia in career weeks and KCSE transition support. Zero cost and zero data risk to students — nothing a learner enters leaves their phone. One career teacher reaches a whole Form Four class, which is the distribution channel this project otherwise lacks.
- Institutions. Universities, colleges and TVETs publish verified fees and cut-offs and meet pre-matched applicants at the decision moment. Verified figures are the contribution that matters most: only 14 of 1367 fees in the catalogue were read off an institution's own published schedule, and the rest say so plainly rather than guessing.
- Employers and corporates. Sponsor sector or county coverage, offer mentorship and site visits, and build early pipelines into growing sectors.
- NGOs and foundations. Fund county rollouts, offline access and reach for marginalised youth, with auditable metrics that do not require tracking anyone.
- Government and agencies. Align with KUCCPS, TVETA, HELB and county education offices to route learners into funded, accredited, real pathways.
Four levels of commitment
Start anywhere. The first two cost nothing and move the needle today.
- Join. List your institution, verify your fees and intakes, or register as a mentor.
- Promote. Put Njia in front of your students, staff families or community — career weeks, WhatsApp groups, radio.
- Support. Sponsor sector or county coverage, translations, offline packs or data acquisition, with named attribution.
- Fund. Anchor multi-year sustainability. Grants or programme funding — never paywalls, and never influence over results.
What we would report back
Njia counts steps, never people. There are no accounts and no tracking, so partner reporting is built from aggregate counts of milestones reached — questionnaire finished, course shortlisted, application started — and from the catalogue itself, which anyone can audit. What that means in practice:
- Reach by county and by the tier a learner can actually enter, not just totals.
- Match quality — the share of readers reaching a grade-eligible, funded shortlist rather than an empty one. The county provision analysis is the honest baseline for that, including the counties where the answer is currently zero.
- Evidence integrity — every figure cited, and unverifiable ones removed rather than estimated. That is checked by the test suite on every deploy, not promised here.
What money cannot buy here
This has to be said on the page rather than in a policy document nobody opens, because the entire value of this catalogue is that its figures are not for sale:
- Payment never affects ranking or ordering. No paid placement, no featured slot, no thumb on the Course Matcher.
- Payment never affects a fee basis or an entry grade. A paid listing is held to exactly the same provenance standard as every other record: a fee is published only where someone read it off the institution's own schedule, and an unsourced figure is removed rather than dressed up.
- A paid listing is disclosed as one, wherever it appears.
- Njia remains independent and unaffiliated. If a listing cannot be honest, it is declined and the money with it.
Getting in touch
One address, read by a person: njiacareerpathways@gmail.com
Open an enquiry on the issue tracker
If you are a student, this is not the page you want
This document is written for funders and partners. If you are deciding what to study, these are for you instead:
- What you can study with your KCSE grade — from C plain down to E.
- Every course by county — 47 pages of entry grades and fees.
- The 20-minute diagnostic — free, and nothing you enter leaves your phone.
If you want to check the numbers
Everything in the proposal comes from data published here in full:
- The whole catalogue as CSV and JSON, with a fee-provenance column.
- County provision analysis — which counties list nothing a school leaver with an E can enter, and why the gap is one missing tier.