My contribution to science and its impact on society
My projects have had impact on policy change, and have also had a direct impact on education. From 2015, the Government, through the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD), proposed to create a section on the Orange book to host the Open Educational Resources which are vetted and accepted for use in Kenyan Schools. The pioneering materials to appear in this section will be the Open Education Resources for English Language Teaching (ORELT) modules from a project I have been leading since 2013. The ORELT project has a direct impact on society because the adoption of the OER materials will significantly reduce the cost of Basic Education. These supplementary teaching and learning materials will go a long away to increasing access to quality education.
Through the proposal writing workshops that i have been running with colleagues from other disciplines, and with financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the number of Phd students who win scholarships to study locally or internationally has also grown. In 2010, the Government, through the National Commission for Science Technology and Innovation (NACOSTI) supported country wide proposal writing workshops which saw the number of students who received funding from DAAD alone increase significantly. We are in the process of conducting a tracer study on the impact of these workshops so that we can advise the Government and funding agencies on the need to support such initiatives in order to have a multiplier effect and consequently increase the number of PhDs in Kenya.The capacity building initiatives that I have been involved in since 2010 has seen the country benefit from more skilled PhD personnel. The Siemens Stiftung project also provided seed money for all the beneficiaries of the training to start small income generating projects. Therefore, through this project, unemployed youth have been empowered to earn a living through legitimate means.