Before the sun had even risen last Monday, Principal Victoria made her first trek off campus to collect the KCSE (Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education) exam papers from our District Educational Officer. She’ll continue to make this journey every weekday for the rest of the month as the Daraja girls undertake the most important exams of their lives. The ever-conscientious Principal Victoria has been spontaneously waking up in the middle of the night from fear she might oversleep and forfeit exam collection.

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Principal Victoria isn’t the only one feeling the pressure: this test will determine whether the Daraja girls will receive the necessary government loans to attend college, and they have been arduously preparing for months. For most students across Kenya, the costs of attending college without securing these loans is prohibitive. Needless to say, the stakes are very high.

After numerous nationwide cheating attempts over the years, the government has taken drastic steps to ensure the exam’s integrity. Each test paper is strenuously guarded during the lead-up to November and only distributed to school principals and administrators on the morning of each respective exam. Local police stations assign guards to sit outside each test-taking center, machine guns on their laps, to watch over the exams. All month, access to campus is extremely limited to anyone not directly involved in test-taking or test-administering. Earlier this year, the Education Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i described the steps that had been taken this year to beef up security measures and cautioned that “any slight mistake by any of our officers will be met with ruthlessness.” The consequences of cheating are severe: earlier this month a principal was arrested for allegedly “tampering with KCSE exam papers.”

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Every day until the end of the month, the Daraja girls will join a record-making 577,253 students across Kenya to sit exams for four hours. Each student takes at least seven subjects: Three mandatory subjects (English, Swahili, and Mathematics), two sciences subjects, a humanities subject, and then an additional subject in a practical or technical field such as business studies or agriculture. After the end of their first day of test-taking, Principal Victoria reported that the girls walked out of their exams happy and pleased with their performances.  Echoing this sentiment, founder Jenni Doherty, who skyped campus the night before the exams, reported that “for taking a test that’s the equivalent of the SATs on steroids, they were sure acting happy!”

Students will receive their results by the end of February – but in the meantime there will be no sitting around and fretting for the Daraja girls! Instead, they will all go home to start jobs, internships, or community service projects. After they receive their results they’ll return to Daraja for our Transition Program, before (fingers crossed!) starting college next January.

All of us at Daraja Academy couldn’t be prouder of the incredibly hard work these students have put into preparing for their exams. We have no doubt they’ll succeed in accomplishing their goals. Please join us in wishing all of the Daraja girls the very best outcome on their exams!