It was one of those crisp Nairobi mornings, the city just beginning to stir to life. Sitting in the famous Super Metro matatu (the Kenyan public transport minibuses), half lost in thought, I suddenly noticed a commotion ahead. A crowd. The driver, just as curious as the rest of us, slowed down and pulled over.
What I saw next left me shaken.
Right there, in the middle of the road, lay a young man. Blood streamed from his head, painting the tarmac red. He wasn’t moving. From the way he was dressed, I guessed he was a boda-boda rider whose day had ended before it even began. But what stunned me most was not just his condition; it was the silence from the onlookers! The indifference. People stood around, watching. No one rushed to help. No one wanted to help!
It was only 6:20 a.m. A young life was slipping away at the break of dawn.
I searched for his motorbike, for the car that hit him, for something that explained the scene. Strangely, there was none just one car parked nearby, looking completely intact. My heart ached. I thought, this young man must have woken up that morning as usual, to his chase daily bread, only to meet death in such a brutal way.
The day went on, but my mind replayed the image repeatedly.
That evening, on my way back home, I found myself sitting next to the driver. Unable to hold back, I asked if he’d heard what had transpired on that road earlier that day. But his reply stunned me even further: “He wasn’t a rider,” the driver said casually. “He was a thief. He was escaping after stealing and ran straight into an oncoming truck.”
For a moment, I froze. My earlier sadness turned into a painful reflection. Could it be that a lack of values had literally cost this young man his life?
That question stayed with me. Every time I recall that morning, I am more convinced that values are not a luxury they are the very asses for survival. Without them, choices spiral, communities break, and lives are lost in tragic ways. This is why I am deeply passionate about life skills and values being mainstreamed in schools and in our everyday work. If we nurture values in young people today and remind the old, perhaps years from now, we will not bury so many young people for reasons that could have been prevented.
That is why through ALiVE’s partnership with KICD, we are working to integrate Values-Based Education (VbE)in the whole School Approach (WSA). The aim of the VbE is to help the learner develop a personal value system that will guide how they feel, act and make choices, not only while in schoolManagement and the rest of their life, strengthen the teachers’ ability to interpret and mainstream values in their professional documents and teaching-learning process, enhance the capacity of members of the school community (teachers, non-teaching staff, Boards of Management and Heads of Institutions) to model and nurture values, enhance the capacities of parents/guardians/caregivers to model and nurture values at family level, enhance collaboration between school and community for promotion of VbE.
One of the key lessons has been that values are not only taught in textbooks, but they are also caught through everyday actions, examples, and culture. It takes everyone. The teacher. The cook. The head of the institution. The chief. The pastor. Every member of the community has a role in shaping a value-driven generation.
Our journey has already begun.
We sampled schools across various regions to see how values were being mainstreamed both in class and beyond. From this, we identified and trained champion teachers, Curriculum support officers (CSOs), County Directors of Education (CDEs), and Head of Institutions (HOIs), equipping them to integrate values into daily school life.
During the Midline visits, some schools had gone beyond expectation. They had created talking walls and values trees, where learners expressed what values meant to them. Pupils performed poems and plays on values, showing us that the seeds we planted were already sprouting.
Next, we move to the Endline study, after which we’ll be launching a full report.
That young man on the road taught me something in the harshest way possible: values are life and death. They guide our choices, our dignity, and our future as a society. If we want a generation that does not just survive but thrives, then values must become the heartbeat of education, the compass in our homes, and the language of our communities.
Well written Gloria.