Yukabeth Kidenda
Kenyan social entrepreneur Yukabeth Kidenda turned a post-college year teaching in Honduras and the twelve-month struggle to find a job when she returned home into a mission to keep opportunity from skipping classrooms back in Nairobi. Today she is Co-founder and CEO of Teach For Kenya, the first local chapter of the global Teach For All network, where she recruits and coaches high-potential graduates who now deliver STEM and literacy lessons to thousands of pupils in underserved schools across eight counties. Before launching the organisation, Kidenda ran continent-wide learning programmes at Microsoft, ALX and Metis, experience that taught her how to braid technology, teacher training and community partnerships into scalable models for quality education.
Named one of the Top 100 Most Influential Young Kenyans in 2019 and Business Daily’s Top 40 Under 40 Women in 2021, she chairs regional ed-tech forums and lobbies government on competency-based curricula that match classroom theory with digital-economy skills. Kidenda’s next goals are to double Teach For Kenya’s annual fellow cohort, roll out a teacher-led data dashboard for early-grade reading, and seed a revolving scholarship fund so rural students can stay in school through Form Four. Her story argues that when young leaders teach, an entire nation learns to dream bigger.