YES! We've opened four schools around Nairobi & Kiambu. Our founding school entrepreneurs, Flora, Didi, Shirley and Amina have gone through the Incubator to set up their schools and together we have 100 learners and vibrant school communities.
Our 2025 Incubator will be our next step, where we continue to learn and improve together along the journey, and create the foundation for future Incubators.
1.Apply to join the incubator:
The first step is applying to the Duara Incubator. We take you through a process to understand your vision and readiness to launch a microschool. We designed the process so that you will enjoy it and learn along the way.
2. Join from the Incubator:
Once accepted, an exciting journey awaits you. Together with a group of other passionate teachers, you are going through various stages of preparing the launch of the microschool in your community. Initially the incubator can be done part-time on the side of a full-time job. After reaching a certain stage, it becomes full time — as you are becoming a school entrepreneur.
3.Launch your microschool:
Once you have gone through the incubator, you are given the Duara Seedling — the physical items and digital tools you need to "plant" your school. You are continuously supported and guided along this journey. You will be part of a strong, caring and growing community of those who dare to re-imagine education.
Duara supports you in three stages:
1.Incubator: Equipping you with essential skills in entrepreneurship, leadership, and operations, the Incubator lays your school entrepreneur foundation. We facilitate your journey, providing tools, processes, coaching, and guidance. From crafting your school's vision, locating a space, to engaging families and the community, and addressing operational requirements. Progressing in stages, you receive unwavering support, primed for a successful school launch.
2.Seedling: Once you are ready to launch your school, we empower you with the Duara Seedling. Its purpose is to maximize your capacity for fostering a vibrant learning environment for your learners, while minimizing your time spent on administration, operations and logistics. You get access to our innovative learning approach, curriculum, tools, and systems – equipping you to efficiently manage your school.
3.Community: You're not alone on this journey as a Duara School Entrepreneur. Embraced by a vibrant, supportive community of like-minded peers, it's a platform for mutual growth. Shared experiences, best practices, and nurturing leadership potential - it's all part of the community fabric.
At Duara, we firmly believe that the ‘essence of education’ lies in:
1) an amazing educator who can coach and nurture children,
2) a vibrant environment that sparks curiosity-driven learning
3) a close-knit community that offers support, mentorship and nourishment to learners, while collectively growing.
Establishing community-based microschools is our way of giving life to this very essence of education. In each microschool, a passionate teacher takes the lead, equipped with the resources to create vibrant learning experiences for each individual. A school is small enough (60-80 learners) to create a safe environment for learners to explore their curiosity freely.
Moreover, every school integrates the community into the learners’ experiences — through mentoring by elders, active involvement of community members and collaboration in projects. Members of the community are also invited to join the learning community by offering or participating in evening courses, or skills training on weekends. In essence, each microschool is a community learning hub.
Our aim: Each school entrepreneur becomes a microschool owner. It's a core value, fueled by our belief in entrepreneurship's power to realize accessible quality education. Think of it like a franchise, contributing a share of revenues back to us. Initially, for our first schools, Duara co-finances the setup costs. Gradually, we will create a "path to ownership" for our school entrepreneurs.
It’s very important to us that becoming a school entrepreneur is accessible to as many amazing female teachers as possible — not blocked by financial barriers. That’s why we’re committed to supporting them on this journey.
To us, it is hugely important that becoming a school entrepreneur is as accessible as possible to the many amazing female teachers out there, and not behind a financial barrier. We therefore want to support the journey to get there.
Aligned with our vision of accessible education, we strive for an inclusive tuition model. We envision schools as community hubs, open to all income levels. Through innovative approaches and resource-sharing within our school community, we're enabling quality education, at a fraction of the cost of many conventional private schools. Together with the school entrepreneur, we determine the optimum tuition for their school depending on their community. Subsequently, actual tuition depends on the family income, assessed systematically.
The Incubator’s purpose is to equip and empower you for the start of your microschool. Should we identify any readiness gaps – whether skills, time, or emotional readiness – we will collaborate to craft your path to launch. This might entail additional preparation, possibly aligning you with the next incubator. Your success is our success.
To achieve our vision, we are re-imagining what school and are creating a community of schools. This enables accessible quality education at scale.
We create a framework encompassing essentials, guidelines, and flexible components. An example for essentials are the alignment with our vision, quality assurance or safety standards. Guidelines cover space design, project themes, learning tools. Flexibility thrives in tailoring schools to your strengths and resources, like afternoon activities, community involvement.
We're also keen on your innovation, a chance for collective learning - be it refining learning outcomes, running processes. Together, we enrich our community of school entrepreneurs.
We strongly believe in the power of passionate female teachers, and empowering them to catalyse change within their community. We are convinced that if a teacher takes ownership as a school entrepreneur, the quality and sustainability of their school is higher than if their were an employed teacher.
We also believe in the power of communities to be involved in the education of their children. We know that each community has unique resources and needs that the school entrepreneur can address.
Our model orbits around the teacher, community, family, and learner, empowered to flourish and catalyze positive change. This is a different philosophy and approach to the typical school chain - often fully centrally owned and organised, limited community integration, lacking teacher ownership and possibility to thrive.
In Kenya, we follow an integrated curriculum — based on the CBC, integrated with Montessori-inspiration, the International Baccalaureate (IB), and other innovative methods. Each school will become registered with the Education Office.
Absolutely. If you share our vision and values and are open to embracing the changes needed to align with Duara's approach, you're invited to our Incubator and Community.
We encourage you to apply and let us know about your timelines. We can then see if we can find a way that works.
