From Mombasa to way beyond: Bricks, Stories and Local Roots to Build the Education of the Future
By Barbara Grazzini and Carlos Oppe
Before we delve into the Educator’s Conference in Mombasa, we wanted to describe the road that brought us there and also what we witnessed while we were there. Because those ten days in Kenya, was not just a professional trip. It was an experience that got under our skin and has since stayed there.
We landed with our team as well as our families, and we let the country pull us in. Tsavo East and Tsavo West came first: endless landscapes, wild nature, time slowing down to match the rhythm of the Savana. The deep green of the bush, the red dirt roads, a yellow ochre horizon that seemed to have no end, skies so blue the clouds looked as if they had been drawn onto a canvas. Sunsets like fire. For a few days, the only thing that mattered was watching, listening, breathing.
Then came the coast, the town of Watamu. A different Kenya. The chaos of the markets, tuk-tuks and motorbikes and cars with their horns always on, weaving between cows and goats feeding on plastic and rubbish. The smell of dry earth, the heat, faces, voices, a thousand new dynamics to take in all at once. We talked to people on the street. We discovered that many Italian families have built strong ties with the community over the years.
And then we came across a teacher. An elementary school teacher we met by chance, who spoke perfect Italian and English, and who simply invited us to come and see his school. We said yes. What we found was a small village school full of orphaned children in spotless uniforms, who welcomed us singing “Jambo Bwana”, the Kenyan welcome song. They hugged us, played with our phones, told us about their days, wanted to know what we had brought. Their teachers were attentive, generous, full of energy, determined to give these kids a future.
From there, our tuk-tuk driver took us to his own son’s school in another part of town: a public school with classes from kindergarten through middle school. By then we knew “Jambo Bwana” by heart, and we sang it together with every class that welcomed us. But outside the gate, we came across three children were playing with old tyres, peeking into the schoolyard. They couldn’t go in. Some were orphans, others had families who couldn’t afford the 25-euro annual fee.
That image stayed with us. And the question that came with it: what can we do? A donation doesn’t fix things. The chalk, the school supplies, the small gifts we brought were a drop in the ocean. They don’t guarantee education for everyone, they don’t put a healthy meal on every plate, they don’t build the safe world these children deserve. The honest answer is that we don’t have an answer. But we walked into the conference carrying that question, and it changed how we listened to everything that followed.
Then came Mombasa, where the horns of tuk-tuks, motorbikes and cars became the soundtrack of the city, between covered markets and shops spilling onto the streets, hundreds of people moving constantly from one place to the next. This was the city that would host us for the next three days.
The Conference
From 1 to 3 May 2026, the Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa — a partner of the Just Maps project led by GAP Spain and coordinated by InEuropa — hosted the Educator’s Conference 2026, an international event bringing together educators, teachers and school leaders from Africa and beyond, around the theme “Educating for Impact: Local Roots, Global Reach”. Three days designed as a single journey, with each session building on the last, weaving together reflections, tools and experiences to rethink the role of education in an interconnected world.
The opening keynote came from Dr. Chizoba Imoka-Ubochima from Nigeria, who spoke about family history as a way to understand local culture and roots — a starting point that felt deeply right after what we had just seen on the road.
Eight sessions followed, moving from the identity and vision of the educational leader, through personal values and professional aspirations, all the way to the global dimension and the role African schools are playing in reshaping curricula worldwide. Trust in communities, systems thinking, experiential environmental education, service learning —
a rich, layered picture, all pointing to the same idea: teaching well means reading your local context and connecting it to wider horizons.
Within this journey, we introduced the LEGO® Serious Play® methodology with two sessions called Transformative Bricks: learning by doing, thinking with your hands before your words.
Barbara of InEuropa led the LSP workshops, supported by Carlos and our colleagues Andrea Pignatti and Juan Manuel Redondo. And here something special happened: our five daughters, aged between 16 and 26, came with us and worked as assistants throughout the event. They sat next to participants, supported the activities, connected with students and teachers from all over the world, joined other workshops, listened to the discussions on “think global, act local”. They came back home with something we couldn’t have given them in any other way — friendships, perspectives, and a kind of life experience that will stay with them forever.
Through play and visual storytelling, participants turned big ideas — global citizenship, environmental sustainability, social justice — into models you could hold, share, point at. Teachers, educators and a group of Aga Khan Academy students built representations of their communities, their values, their everyday challenges and their hopes. Brick by brick, different but deeply connected stories emerged. Water pollution, waste management — with plastic as the recurring theme — energy poverty, the need to protect green areas, rethink mobility, ensure fair access to the city. The same themes we had seen with our own eyes on the coast and on the streets of Mombasa came back here, shaped in bricks and colour by the hands of those who live their daily lives in these vibrant African communities.
This wasn’t just a creative exercise. The point was the shift from abstract to concrete: making complex ideas around Global Citizenship Education into something three-dimensional and shareable. Every construction had a place. Every story became part of a collective narrative.
The two workshops ran across 1 and 2 May with around 78 participants in small working groups. The dynamic pushed people beyond individual reflection: separate pieces, brought together, started to look like a shared vision of what a community can be.
What stayed with us, beyond the models on the tables, was exactly this: the chance to see and touch how local realities can speak to global challenges. An honest exchange among educators mostly from Africa, all asking the same question — how do we educate today, with tomorrow in mind?
Outside the workshop room
The conference also gave us space for something else.
We both, coordinators of the European Just Maps project, met with the twenty-one students of the Just Mappers group from the Aga Khan Academy to review their research. These young people are mapping parts of their city to identify challenges and opportunities and turn them into concrete proposals to bring to local government and stakeholders. Their focus is environmental sustainability, and they are working on three issues: the thousands of tuk-tuks clogging city traffic and adding to pollution, which could be converted to electric; the food waste produced by local restaurants, where real intervention is possible; and the expansion of mangrove planting in the city’s green and wetland areas — plants that clean the air and physically hold the coastline together, protecting it from erosion.
Three proposals, different in scale, all built on the same logic: start from what you know and live every day and imagine real solutions from there.
The energy of these young Just Mappers was contagious. Nine of them will travel to Zaragoza in October 2026 for the project’s transnational meeting, where students from Kenya, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Poland will share their mapping work and build visions for fairer, more sustainable cities together. Months of local research turning into a global conversation.
To close the three days, Carlos of GAP Spain stepped in as judge for a lively debate: “Education is no longer about intelligence; it’s about who uses AI best.” Four students for the motion, four teachers against. The students were so sharp and so convincing that the four judges unanimously awarded them the debate. A fitting finale for a conference that put at its center not just knowledge, but the ability to act, to be together, and to change things.
We came home with the bricks packed away, the songs of those children still in our ears, and the same question we had walked in with — what can we do? We don’t have a clean answer. But we have a clearer sense of where to start: from the local, from the relationships, from the hands that build. And from the next generation, ours and theirs, who already know that thinking global and acting local is not a slogan. It’s the only way forward.
