By NTS staff
In rural Kenya, you learn quickly that electricity is never something you can take for granted.
At Nyamboyo Technical School, power outages are a normal part of life—but “normal” doesn’t mean easy. In our area, outages happen for all kinds of reasons: severe weather, improperly maintained equipment, and even government shutdowns connected to periods of political violence. The result is the same: the lights go out, the internet drops, the phones struggle, and suddenly the simplest tasks become complicated.
When the power is down, it doesn’t just affect the classroom. It limits our communication and can completely shut down the workflow between NTS and our U.S. team, as well as with our vendors, service providers and emergency medical providers. In a school that depends on coordination—supplies, reports, payroll, planning, documents, donor updates—losing power can freeze progress instantly.
The hardest part is the unpredictability.
If we knew outages would happen every day from 2–4 p.m., we could plan around it. But that’s not how it works. The power might go down for ten minutes or ten hours. It might go off right as we’re trying to complete something time-sensitive with our U.S. colleagues—an urgent decision, a financial deadline, a critical document that needs to be sent, a call that can’t be rescheduled. And because the causes are outside our control, you can’t “problem solve” your way out of it in the moment. You can only wait.
Until now.
After weighing the impact of these outages on school operations, our Board made a clear decision: We needed a new generator—one that is efficient, quiet, and reliable. Not a temporary fix. Not a patchwork solution. A real operational backbone that would protect our ability to function even when the grid fails.
And then our Board did what strong Boards do. They came together and raised the funds.
Because of their commitment and follow-through, NTS now has a new generator. It’s a Maybach MB6000LHEW with dual welding capability, which means it can also be used for welding when the school needs to make repairs to any of our steel infrastructure. It runs on diesel for up to 8 hours and powers the entire school.
This is more than equipment—it’s a shift in what is possible for our school. For the first time, we are not at the mercy of forces that have felt beyond our control. We have power when we need it. We can keep working. We can stay connected. We can run the school with confidence and consistency.
The benefits are immediate. Our staff can communicate reliably. Our operations can move forward even during outages. Our students benefit as we become more “wired” in how we work—more able to use technology, more able to plan and deliver learning consistently, more able to function like the professional institution we are building.
This is what empowerment looks like in practice: not a big speech, but a practical tool that removes a barrier and unlocks momentum.
And we’re not stopping here.
The next step is solar energy. So, to be continued…