Mission

Tunapanda Institute spreads dignity through training young people in East Africa for professional careers and creative self-expression, specializing in fields related to technology, design, and business.

What We Do

Tunapanda Institute is like a stool with 3 legs:

- Trained by Tunapanda: digital era learning communities. We provide no-cost 3-month intensive training courses to young people aged 19-25 and assist graduates in finding employment. Our primary training facility is in a Nairobi informal settlement called Kibera. Some graduates remain to become apprentice teachers who coach future cohorts of learners while simultaneously continuing advanced studies in areas like software engineering, design, and entrepreneurship.

- Produced by Tunapanda: earning while learning. After the apprenticeship phase, many of our team members enter a journeyman phase. Here, we further hone our skills in the craft of teaching and school administration while earning revenues by providing digital services to clients. This keeps the school open and free while ensuring we have a sustainable model and curricula that meet market needs.

- Powered by Tunapanda: remixing the model. A big goal is to keep the costs of learning as low as possible. In many parts of the world, including East Africa, bandwidth is unaffordable and technology-enabled teachers are scarce. We build open source software and create open educational resources (OERs) that enable others to remix our model with ease and affordability, even in difficult, remote areas like Turkana. We also run an outreach program to high schools in our neighborhood and use wireless technology to make our materials available to the wider community.