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Founder/ Director
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Engr. Oku Kanayo Egbeni

ENGR. OKU KANAYO EGBENI is Director and Co-Founder of Children In Freedom School (CIFS). He is a Nigerian British and resident in Kenya. He holds a BSc and MSc in Computer Engineering from the University of Benin and University of Dalarna and is a senior associate member of the British Computer Society. After more than a decade in Europe as a Business strategist and ICT Consultant for companies such as Hewlett Packard and Virgin Media [partnering with teams in England, Italy, Libya, Nigeria, and Sweden]; he relocated back to Kenya with his wife at the beginning of 2014 to serve African children. Together they established an international NGO called Children In Freedom (registered in Kenya and USA). Their work has directly touched the lives of over 300 children through scholarship and mentorship, and mentored more than 10,000 others. Oku is a polymath. His multifaceted talents have seen him design the school's architecture and lead in its engineering and construction from scratch. He has established an innovative e-learning platform for the school; this facilitated a continuation of learning even during the covid-19 lockdown in 2020. His passion in IT has seen him teach programming at CIFS to children 5 years and above. He has started holistic projects at the school like fish and chicken farming, programming, engineering, and cooking. He is a great cook and personally trained the school’s kitchen staff; CIFS is famous for its delicious food. Oku is deeply Pan African and has committed his life to building African children to reach the highest expression of themselves, and partner with or lead their peers from all over the world.

Dr. Utheri Kanayo
Profiles

Dr. Utheri Kanayo

DR. UTHERI KANAYO (née Susan Kiragu) is Principal and Co-Founder of Children In Freedom School. She is a Kenyan and holds a B.Ed (Kenyatta University), M.Ed (University of Nairobi), and MPhil and PhD (Education) from the University of Cambridge. After her studies in the UK, she worked as an academic researcher at The Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and later as a Research Manager for Camfed International. In 2014 she resigned from her well-paying job and relocated back to Kenya with her husband to establish an international NGO called Children in Freedom. CIF offers scholarships and mentorship to African children, encouraging them to love their African heritage, and use their talents to innovate solutions for their communities. In 2016, CIF’s Afrocentric ‘Mentorship for Freedom’ programme received recognition from President Uhuru and Margaret Kenyatta. In 2018, three years after her return to Kenya, Utheri and her husband Oku co-founded the first Afrocentric school in East Africa, Children In Freedom School (CIFS). CIFS has grown to be a gifted and talented centre, dually grounding children to embrace their Africanness (who they are) and preparing them to be global leaders – just as good as their peers abroad, if not better. Utheri aims for CIFS to be a gold standard of what education should be for the black child and hopes that in future the CIFS model will be absorbed by other schools in Africa and the world. Utheri is well published in the social sciences and well exposed to Africa’s educational landscape, having carried out research in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, and Swaziland. She is an Independent Consultant for The Beacon Scholarship, an outstanding leadership programme for gifted African children; and also a Metis fellow.