HISTORY
BEGINNINGS
KenSAP began in 2004 as an informal effort on the part of its two founders, Mike Boit and John Manners, to help a few gifted students from educationally neglected areas of western Kenya gain admission to world-class universities. Mike, a professor at Kenyatta University, sought out a half-dozen highly promising high school graduates and found a venue where they could live and study together for several weeks. John, a semi-retired journalist, came to Kenya to prepare the students for the SAT and familiarize them with the college application process. When five of the six college candidates were admitted to highly competitive colleges with full financial aid, the two founders realized that they had started something.
The next year, KenSAP came to the attention of Charles Field-Marsham, a Canadian investor with business interests in Kenya. He offered to finance the program, which enabled it to conduct two extended residential training sessions for each new group of college candidates and to pay for its students’ test and application fees. Charles’s backing also helped KenSAP continue to provide various forms of support for the successful college candidates once they reached North America.
THE PROGRAM EVOLVES
Part of the original conception of KenSAP grew out of the founders’ background in running. Mike had been a celebrated international runner in the 1970s and ‘80s, earning multiple medals in the Olympics and Commonwealth Games. John had spent part of his time as a journalist covering the exploits of Kenyan runners. Together they hoped to take advantage of Kenya’s reputation as a font of running talent to boost KenSAP students’ chances of college admission. For years before KenSAP’s founding, a steady flow of gifted young Kenyan runners had reached American universities on athletic scholarships, but nearly all of them had attended institutions of lesser academic distinction than those to which KenSAP students would apply. As Mike and John were well aware, however, even America’s most academically selective institutions recruit athletes. They therefore focused the program’s initial efforts in the part of Kenya with the highest concentration of running talent, Rift Valley Province. They expected that at least a few KenSAP students from that region, though chosen largely for their academic accomplishments, might also turn out to be runners who showed enough promise to interest coaches at academically selective colleges, and thereby strengthen the students’ chances of admission.
Through the program’s first decade, about 20% of its students had the support of college coaches during the admission process. Many of them became valuable contributors to their college teams, and one was a nine-time NCAA Division III national champion! (Peter Kosgei, Hamilton College ’11, at left.) But as KenSAP alumni increasingly distinguished themselves at their elite institutions and showed themselves likely to have significant impact back in Kenya, it became clear that the program could no longer focus on a single region. KenSAP therefore expanded its reach to encompass all of Kenya, and it deemphasized its athletic component. The acronym KenSAP, which initially stood for Kenya Scholar-Athlete Project, became Kenya Scholar Access Program, and KenSAP took in talented students from every corner of the country.