“Schools Cannot Do It Alone: The Power of Partnership with Education Stakeholders to Enrich the Learning Experiences of Kenya’s Children”

Partnerships among schools, communities, parents, and policymakers are essential for improving student outcomes. This paper examines how these stakeholders supported the delivery of educational interventions for adolescents living in Nairobi’s poor urban settings. The analysis draws on documents from the Advancing Learning Outcomes and Transformational Change (ALOT Change) study and qualitative interviews with parents, community-based organizations (CBOs), and community leaders. Using thematic synthesis, the study found that each partner played a distinct role in the intervention’s success: parents supported attendance, community leaders guided key decisions and mobilized residents, mentors and counselors provided after-school support and parental counseling, CBOs oversaw implementation and strengthened community ownership, and policy actors helped shape the intervention. The findings also show that long-term sustainability depends on embedding the program within these stakeholder groups and fostering their ownership. A key factor in sustainability was the active involvement of community members, parents, and adolescents in the research process, which helped integrate local knowledge, align priorities, and build shared responsibility for both the problems and the solutions.