BY MIRA THAKKAR
Right this instant in schools across rural Kenya, students are experiencing something that nobody ever imagined could be possible: quality STEM education. Until recent years, the idea of schools in rural Siaya County, Kenya, having laptops, projectors, and generators, along with volunteers and teachers who could help children learn how to use them, seemed almost like a far-fetched dream for most residents. Today, STEM Sprouts is helping make that dream come true.
STEM Sprouts, a nonprofit focused on expanding global access to STEM education, was founded by youth STEM advocate Harshit Chaturvedy. Chaturvedy grew up surrounded by STEM and with plentiful opportunities to learn about its many different aspects. When he realized how unequal access to STEM education can be around the world, he was inspired to make a change.
“We started out just running workshops,” Chaturvedy explained. “But pretty quickly we realized workshops alone weren’t enough to build the kind of impact we wanted, and that pushed us to build out everything else STEM Sprouts does now: chapters, curriculum, policy work, partnerships.”
This shift toward becoming a more structured organization, rather than simply hosting various events, has enabled STEM Sprouts to grow. Their August cohort launch is targeting 15 schools across Siaya County, and each school has more than 3,000 students. Chaturvedy sees this launch as a way to measure whether their efforts are producing the results they want and what changes they need to make. To reach this milestone, however, they have had to overcome many challenges, especially while working with a team halfway across the world.
“Working with our Kenya chapter, one real logistical hurdle was payments,” Chaturvedy said. “Little things like that taught us that cross-border logistics need as much attention as the actual programming.”
Working through these issues has been difficult, but Chaturvedy and his team have persevered, and they hope to continue growing even further. While the project is currently in Kenya, Chaturvedy hopes to expand it to other countries.
“Long term, we’re aiming for deeper partnerships, things like NCSS, UN-adjacent organizations such as UNICEF, and continued congressional-level policy engagement,” Chaturvedy stated. “We’re also trying to find bigger partners so financial stability doesn’t become a concern in the future.”
To establish the program in Kenya, Chaturvedy has worked closely with Moses Okoth, the organization’s Kenya Chapter Lead, who also founded local initiatives such as Siaya STEAM Hub and Siaya Community Library. His experience in curriculum design and negotiating with schools has helped STEM Sprouts tremendously in connecting with other projects in the county. Living there, he has seen firsthand the effects of Kenya’s focus on Competency-Based Education (CBE) in recent years, an approach that has led to significant improvements in students’ practical learning. He hopes to continue being part of this nationwide journey through STEM Sprouts and help fill the gaps in rural areas.
“STEM Sprouts’ role is to make sure counties like Siaya aren’t left out of the training, resources, or pilots as CBE rolls out,” Okoth noted.
As the Kenya Chapter Lead, Okoth has strived to provide schools with what they need, when they need it. This has been difficult because they work in remote rural areas, where most people have little or no access to technology and therefore struggle to use it. There are also countless logistical on-site challenges that Okoth works to overcome every day.
“Most STEM hardware/curricula assume stable power and connectivity that rural Siaya schools don’t have, which is why building an offline-first, WhatsApp-native approach instead of forcing well-resourced-country tools into under-resourced conditions is key,” Okoth said. “It is also important to sustain volunteer and teacher morale through constant, small technical failures, which we address by treating morale as something actively managed, not assumed.”
As STEM Sprouts gears up for its large August cohort, the team knows its hard work will help uplift Siaya County and pave the way for future growth. Chaturvedy and Okoth have collaborated on every aspect of the project, from sourcing hardware and delivering it to recruiting volunteers to teach students how to use it. STEM Sprouts is poised to achieve even more in the future, and it is exciting to see how rural Kenya—and other countries—will benefit as a result.
