From Nairobi with Purpose: Reflections on the 1st KEMI International Conference
By Shem Bodo, Nuria Moreno, Mamadou Lamine Sow and Chinedu Anarado
The Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi fell quiet on the evening of Friday, 17th April 2026. Five days of high-level engagements on best practices, innovations, challenges, and opportunities around improving school leadership — in terms of policy, practice, and research challenges —came to a close. Over 1,700 participants, joining in person and virtually from the 16 plus countries across Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America began the journey home carrying the weight of what had been said, and the responsibility of what must now be done.
The 1st International Conference of the Kenya Education Management Institute (KEMI) was, by any measure, a landmark event. Crucially, government is showing the sort of leadership that births results. The initiative to hold the conference echoes the consistent push, championed by organizations like ADEA, for government ownership.
For the African Centre for School Leadership (ACSL), it was something more personal. ACSL did not simply attend this conference. As a core partner to KEMI, keynote contributor, presenter of the continent’s most comprehensive school leadership evidence reviews, panel moderator and day chairperson — ACSL was woven into the fabric of every day of the conference proceedings. This blog reflects what we heard, what we contributed, and what we believe must follow.
What the week confirmed
The conference opened on Monday with a keynote speech from the ADEA Executive Secretary, Albert Nsengiyumva, that set the tone — anchored on the key policy messages during the official opening — for everything that followed. His argument was precise yet provocative: Africa is not short of knowledge on school leadership. The research exists. The frameworks exist. Think of CESA 2026–2035, the ADEA Triennale, the African Continental Teacher Qualification Framework etc. What is missing is the political will to act, and the accountability systems to ensure that what is promised is delivered.
By the time the conference closed on Friday, that argument had been tested, reinforced, and deepened across five days of keynotes, panels, roundtables, abstract and research presentations. What emerged was not a new agenda. It was a clarified one — sharper on what is working, more honest about what is not, and more specific about what concrete action must look like.
On what is working, the conference was genuinely encouraging. Conversations recognized school leadership as a critical driver of quality education outcomes— and this conference is itself a testament to that. Competency-based learning approaches and learner-centred pedagogies are expanding across the continent. Multi-stakeholder collaboration between governments and development partners is strengthening. Afrocentric leadership models — grounded in Ubuntu philosophy and indigenous knowledge systems — are gaining the institutional attention they have long deserved. A good number of school leaders participated in the conference who showed a high level of commitment to achieve excellence on their performance. They featured on panels, sharing their experiences, calling for more support but essentially, demonstrating the value of creativity and impactful leadership.
On what requires strengthening, the conference was equally honest. The gap between policy design and school-level implementation persists — and in many systems, widens — coupled with weak alignment to regional and continental frameworks. Professional development frameworks for school leadership remain fragmented and unstandardised. Research is not consistently translated into policy or practice. Education financing remains insufficient and unevenly protected. Community engagement in school governance is still largely ceremonial rather than substantive. Achieving gender balance, including strengthening women participation at leadership levels remain crucial.
These are not new findings. But having them named and validated by over 1,700 stakeholders in a single week — representing governments, universities, development partners, civil society, and school leaders themselves — gives them a weight and a political visibility that isolated reports cannot match.
ACSL’s contribution across the week
ACSL’s presence at the conference was substantive and multi-dimensional. Albert Nsengiyumva opened the conversation on Monday with his keynote speech around eight pillars for education leadership transformation. ADEA’s Senior Program Officer, Shem Bodo moderated the first panel discussion on positioning school leadership as a strategic driver of education reforms. Tom Vandenbosch, the General Director of VVOB, delivered the Day 2 keynote address on the future of school leadership professional development, and the closing address, reflecting on the swahili proverb that one finger alone, is not enough (kidole kimoja hakivunji chawa). Joyceline Kirezi and Caren Namalenya presented the findings of the ACSL Continental Mapping Report on School leadership — one of the most recent comprehensive evidence syntheses on school leadership ever conducted on the African continent, drawing on 1,759 research publications and input from 97 stakeholders across 16 countries.
Chantal Kabanda Dusabe moderated a panel on transforming professional development beyond compliance. Sandrine Ishimwe brought ACSL’s gender and equity voice to a panel on resilience and inclusion. Mamadou Lamine Sow moderated a session on financing education reform. On day 5, Leila Abdullahi moderated a panel on bridging the evidence and policy gap. ACSL also chaired the full proceedings of Day 4 — overseeing sessions on digital transformation, a roundtable with school heads on CBC implementation, and a panel on education financing.
In between, we presented an abstract on the methodological approaches we adopted for the school leadership mapping across countries.
Taken together, this represents the most concentrated demonstration of ACSL’s convening depth and technical breadth on a single platform to date. It is how we understand our role in terms of facilitating conversations on school leadership. We came not to observe but to contribute — and the feedback from delegates across the week affirmed that ACSL’s voice in this space is both credible and needed.
The Continental Mapping Report: a landmark for the sector
The formal launch of the ACSL Continental Mapping Report on Day 2 deserves particular reflection. This report is not a position paper or a policy brief. It is a rigorous, multi-method evidence synthesis — built on desk reviews, stakeholder interviews, and validation workshops across 16 countries, produced over an extended period of fieldwork and analysis.
Its findings do not flatter. They document a continent where school leadership is increasingly recognised in policy but insufficiently resourced in practice; where professional development exists but remains project-based, fragmented, and largely disconnected from career progression; where the evidence base is growing but remains uneven, inaccessible, and underutilised.
But the report also documents genuine momentum — and it provides a fresh continental baseline from which progress can be measured. That is its most enduring contribution: not just a snapshot of where Africa is on school leadership, but a foundation from which the sector can hold itself accountable for where it goes next.
What must follow
The conference produced a clear call to action, organised around nine pillars: governance and institutional reform; sustainable and equitable financing; leadership capacity development; collaborative and community-centred leadership; data-driven leadership and research; technology and innovation with an equity focus; equity, inclusion, and social justice; regional and continental harmonisation; and resilient leadership for crisis and emergency contexts.
KEMI has committed to developing a roadmap and monitoring framework to track implementation of the conference recommendations — reporting on progress at the next KEMI conference, with updates to stakeholders in between. That commitment is significant, and ACSL welcomes it.
For our part, ACSL leaves the Nairobi conference with a deepened partnership with KEMI, renewed conversations about expanding the school leadership agenda in Kenya beyond the foundation phase, and a clearer sense of the specific policy and practice gaps where our technical support can make the most difference.
The one message we carry most firmly from the week is the one Albert placed before delegates on the opening day and that echoed in every session that followed. The knowledge exists. The frameworks exist. The tools exist. What determines whether any of it produces change in the life of a child in a rural school in Kenya, or Senegal, or Mozambique — is whether the people in positions of power choose to act on what they know.
One billion young people are waiting for that choice to be made!