For many students in Kenya’s remote and hard-to-staff areas, access to learning is shaped not only by whether a school is nearby, but also by whether qualified teachers are available for key subjects.
These constraints can be particularly significant in Science, Mathematics, and English—subjects that support potential progression, opportunity, and future employability. In under-resourced schools, limited access to qualified teachers can constrain students’ learning opportunities.
Expanding access to quality instruction in these subjects also connects this work to the World Bank Group’s broader Education and Skills agenda, which emphasizes helping students build strong foundations, develop job-relevant skills, and ultimately put those skills to work.
Through the World Bank–Mastercard Foundation partnership, Kenya explored how technology-enabled teaching could help bridge this gap. The aim was not simply to livestream lessons, but to understand what it would take to make remote teaching effective, equitable, and sustainable in the schools that need it most.
This work also built on Kenya’s participation in the EdTech Policy Academy, where the country’s 2023 action plan identified hybrid learning, EdTech coordination, digital infrastructure, e-content, and teacher capacity building as priorities. In 2024, the Academy further sharpened the teacher capacity pathway through online, cohort-based training and communities of practice.
Exploring Technology to Help Address Gaps in Teacher Availability
Under the Kenya Secondary Education Quality Improvement Project, the Teachers Service Commission piloted livestreamed lessons as a hybrid education initiative to help address shortages of qualified subject teachers in selected remote areas and expand access to quality instruction.
The model was practical and ambitious. Well-resourced “Principal Schools” delivered lessons face-to-face to their own students while simultaneously livestreaming them to “Satellite Schools” facing staffing and resource constraints. The pilot involved 12 schools: two Principal Schools—Alliance Girls and Machakos School—connected to ten Satellite Schools. Lessons focused on Science, Mathematics, and English and were delivered through Microsoft Teams.
The approach enabled schools with relatively stronger teaching and digital capacity to serve as shared learning resources. Rather than expecting every school to solve teacher shortages alone, the pilot explored how technology could extend the reach of qualified teachers and quality instruction across distance.
The model was designed to complement, not replace, efforts to strengthen teaching capacity in rural and under-resourced schools. As Frederico Antunes de Carvalho, Senior EdTech Consultant with the World Bank, explained:
“To manage the class and facilitate the process, the expertise would come from a central school… so this complements the effort of supporting rural and under-resourced schools that might not have the same STEM teachers.”
