By Dominic Odipo
What do these world-class universities and colleges have in common? Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Middlebury College and Princeton?
What about Seoul National University, Smith College, Swarthmore College, the University of Cape Town, the University of Manchester, the University of Pennsylvania, Williams College, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and Yale?
Two things. First, each of them will be admitting a high-grade Kenyan male or female into its undergraduate programme later this year. And, second, each of those students will have been sponsored and mentored by the Equity Bank Group under its university sponsorship programme. Under this programme, 21 top Kenyan scholars, just breaking out of teen age, will join these world-leading universities and colleges on full scholarships provided by those universities themselves.
That means that these scholars will be able to access some of the best educational facilities in the world at no direct cost to themselves or their families.
Courtesy of Equity Bank, some of these country’s finest and most beautiful minds will sit in the lecture and tutorial rooms of some of the finest higher institutions of learning in the world.
Under the bank’s university sponsorship programme, which was rolled out in 1998, some of the country’s brightest students are sponsored and mentored by the bank through their entire university education within the country or overseas.
All their university fees and allowances are paid by the bank through all the years these students study at any university of their choice within the country.
During the holidays, these students return to work at Equity Bank branches across the country and are paid accordingly. And, at these universities, these students can take any course they like, ranging from architecture to zoology.
They don’t need to major in finance, economics, banking or accounting. The idea is to develop the mind and leadership potential of the scholar, regardless of whether he or she later becomes a doctor, lawyer, engineer or architect.
Some of these top students are also encouraged and mentored to apply for places and scholarships at the world’s leading universities. Under this programme, almost 70 of these young Kenyans have already been admitted to these top universities and institutions of higher learning.
The leading universities in the western world, and particularly in the United States, now have at least one Equity Bank scholar in their rolls. Bright, young Kenyan scholars of either gender are now studying at some of the world’s premier universities courtesy of a bank that did not even exist 20 years ago.
According to the bank’s chief executive officer, Dr James Mwangi, the main objective of the bank under this sponsorship programme is to expose these students to some of the best brains in the world, as they get global exposure, access the best educational resources and develop their leadership skills for the new century.
In-built bias
It is, in effect, a programme run by a private firm that is steadily but quietly producing the new frontiers men and women of the Vision 2030 generation.
There are two things about this programme which the rest of the country needs to take due notice of. First, the bank does not itself select the students who join its university sponsorship programme every year. These selections are made, in effect, by the Kenya National Examinations Council, which sets and grades the annual Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examinations.
The bank simply takes the final list of the top male and female students from each district and then absorbs then into the programme.
Second, because of the nature of the selection process, the entire country is covered. There are scholars in this programme from Turkana, Kakamega, Nyeri, Kilifi, Kajiado and of course Nairobi. There is no in-built bias towards any particular tribe, gender or region.
As a result, these scholars have become a microcosm of the whole country as it includes young men and women, Turkana, Luo and Maasai, city dwellers and those from the peripheries of our most rural counties.
As most of us already know, there is virtually no investment that one can make which is more valuable than the provision of a top quality education for a child.
When this investment entails lectures and tutorials given by some of the finest brains in some of the best universities in the world, then its real value doubles or even triples.
If the other Kenyan banks do not wake up to what is happening at Equity Bank, they might soon find that, as the old Irish used to say, it is too late to sharpen the sword when the trumpet calls for battle!
The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.
dominicodipo@yahoo.co.uk
