When Mwai Kibaki took office in January 2003, one of his first acts was to abolish school fees for primary education. The effect was immediate and overwhelming. On the first day of the new school term, 1.5 million children who had been kept at home by poverty walked into classrooms for the first time. Teachers were overwhelmed. Classrooms designed for forty held a hundred. Books ran out. But the children came. It was one of the most genuinely transformative education policy decisions in Kenya's history, and its effects have been felt by an entire generation.