00:00I'm very honoured to be suggested for this ICON Award and I'm accepting it with a lot of joy because it motivates me to go one step further, to find solutions to problems which seem to be very difficult.
00:18In the International Year of Peace and Trust, I believe that the foundation of peace and trust lays in the empowerment of people, and especially young people.
00:30To myself, my name is Sarah Röker, I'm originally from Germany and I was a lecturer in teacher training.
00:38And since 2014, I'm in African countries. Since three years, I'm here in an organisation which is community-based in St. Martin, through Comundo, an organisation which is sending experts like me to organisations and I'm seconded in St. Martin.
01:01The focus here and the heart of my engagement is on empowering, as I said, empowering through education, through quality and relevance of the education.
01:15And the way to go is the competency-based education, to employ the competency-based education approach.
01:24And of course, this is not new to Kenya, but it has never been implemented.
01:28So I'm supporting teachers to implement. I'm convincing teachers why we have this competency-based, why do we need real-life connections in the education.
01:39I really want them to understand and then be able to implement.
01:45So I've been working with several teachers here in the whole county.
01:49And I've also been working with teachers in an area where there are a lot of conflicts, ethnical conflicts.
01:59And we adopted together a manual for peace education to enable the children to understand what is happening and do it differently from what they see.
02:14Do it differently, try to live in harmony, empower them to live together.
02:23Another thing I've been doing to support trainers at vocational training centres and even teachers, there's a need of not only training them, but showing them how it can be done.
02:37And I've been leading the development of a soft skills training manual so that the facilitators, the vocational facilitators, know how to facilitate the development of soft skills.
02:52So it's also about the competency-based approach.
02:56It's about they learn more than the skills.
02:59They need also to be empowered.
03:01They need to grow their self-esteem because I can see that the self-esteem of many young people is very low.
03:09And to give them an opportunity to thrive in their lives.
03:13So I'm very happy to be part of these.
03:16And I can see whenever I do a training myself, I can see an increase in confidence.
03:21And I believe that this is the way to do.
03:25And on the more systemic level, I was facilitating together with the county government here and St. Martin,
03:33we were facilitating the development of a policy for vocational training because vocational training has to be relevant and also of quality.
03:43So I'm giving everything I can to improve the lives of these especially vulnerable youths who don't know a way, how to go, where to go,
03:55and who can't thrive in the school which was originally only for academic performers, meaning those ones who can memorize knowledge.
04:09So now we need to empower these young people to build peace and trust.
04:15For that, I think, and I can provide you with many pictures of my work, what I'm doing together with my colleagues here,
04:23to empower the youth to find a way, a different way out of unemployment, out of conflicts and out of the issue of drug abuse and so on and so forth.
04:39So I thank you very much for this reward.
