Learning Chinese widens job opportunities for Kenyans

Maureen Achieng took up Chinese language studies during her undergraduate education so that she could get a chance to go to China. However, as jobs became hard to come by and her interest in the Chinese language grew, she took the studies of the Chinese language more seriously and today she teaches the language at the Confucius Institute at the University of Nairobi.

During Achieng's days as a student, the Chinese language had not been officially adopted into the Kenyan education curriculum and she was lucky to learn the language at the Confucius Institute.

In 2019, the Kenyan government introduced the Chinese language as an optional subject for young learners along with other foreign languages such as French, German and Arabic while implementing its competency-based curriculum. Achieng sees this as a windfall because from her experience, learning a new language as an adult was not easy.