When something goes wrong in a school (no textbooks, overcrowded classrooms, teachers who never show up), the easiest response is to complain about it. What the Rural Youth Collectives (RYCs) within the Kuyenda Collective do is something harder and more powerful. They ask why.
Why weren’t the textbooks budgeted for? Who was responsible for that budget? Was the money released on time? Did it reach the schools that needed it most? These are not the questions of bystanders. They are the questions of people who understand that the problems visible at the school level are symptoms of deeper failures in planning, financing, and accountability — and who have decided to engage with the system at that level.
The RYCs operate across four countries in Africa, made up of young people between the ages of 15 and 35. Students, young adults, teachers, and community members who may no longer be in school but remain deeply invested in education because they have lived its shortcomings. What makes them different is not just their commitment — it is their approach. They are what Kuyenda Collective calls non-traditional actors: voices that are rarely invited into education planning and decision-making spaces, but whose insight is arguably the most important. They are the ones closest to whether the system is actually working.
Through the Kuyenda Collective’s system-strengthening model, RYC members are trained and supported to engage directly with the institutions and officials responsible for education in their communities. They attend budget hearings. They track whether funds reach schools. They document what is happening on the ground and use that evidence to hold the right people accountable — not in a confrontational way, but in the way of people who know the system well enough to ask the questions it cannot easily dodge.
The result is a generation of young people who are not waiting to be invited to the table. They are building the case for why they belong there.
This is the work that Sauti Zote exists to amplify. In the coming weeks, as we build toward our collaboration with the Global Campaign for Education on 26 May, we will be sharing more of what the RYCs are doing, saying, and seeing. Because their voices are not a footnote to this work. They are the point.