Your Family Sacrificed for
Your Child's Education.
Don't Let It Be Wasted.

Growing up, the answer was always in my hands. In Form Two, when presented with optional subjects, I rejected Agriculture with conviction — choosing Woodwork instead, deliberately, passionately, without hesitation. I excelled. My teacher Mr. Kirui recognised my dedication and made me workshop prefect. I scored a B+ in KCSE, with outstanding performance in the subject I loved most.

I already knew I wanted to be an architect. As I would learn later, my passion for Woodwork wasn't just a hobby — it was pointing me somewhere specific, toward architecture, construction management, interior design, civil engineering, and urban planning. But no mentor connected those dots for me. Although I missed the architecture course due to my grade and the high competition threshold, I later discovered a painful truth — with that same B+, I had qualified for several alternative courses that would have channelled me appropriately into the built environment. Courses in construction management, building technology, and interior design were all within my reach. But nobody told me they existed. The grade was never the barrier. The information was. And when the time came to apply for university, I filled my entire university application in under 15 minutes — without real thought, without understanding what I was choosing, and without anyone to help me choose wisely.

While waiting for university placement, I didn't sit idle. With my parents' support, I bought basic carpentry tools, set up a small workshop in my village, and built a business from scratch. Clients came. My reputation grew. The village called me "fundi." I was living my purpose, one plank at a time.

Then the university placement letter arrived. I was placed in Ornamental and Landscape Science — under the Faculty of Agriculture. The irony was painful. I had deliberately rejected Agriculture in secondary school. A friend glanced at my admission letter and laughed: "So you'll be planting flowers in Australia?" We laughed. But inside, something felt deeply wrong.

When I eventually joined university, the cruel confirmation came quietly. Semester after semester, the only units that came alive for me were those touching on design or construction — a persistent reminder of where I truly belonged. But those units were few. The rest felt like someone else's education.

I pushed through and graduated. Circumstances drifted me into urban planning — popularly known as physical planning — not by choice, but by opportunity. For ten years I worked as an Assistant Planner, then Senior Assistant Planner. I gained deep technical expertise — GIS mapping, spatial analysis, master plans, and development control regulations. I worked alongside architects, engineers, and surveyors. And throughout it all, my built environment instincts never stayed quiet — I hustled designing basic house plans on the side, advised clients on soil suitability for building construction, and people began calling me "engineer." I never disappointed. The passion was always there. It had simply found the wrong container.

But I was not a registered planner. I lacked the formal credentials the profession legally required. Mid-career, the moment that made everything unbearably clear arrived. A senior planning position opened — exactly aligned with the experience I had built. I had the skills, the network, and the exposure. I had even mentored the intern who later secured a similar role elsewhere. But I was disqualified — not for lack of ability, but for lack of the right credentials. I explored regularising through a Master's degree in Planning — but the cost was prohibitively expensive, far beyond what a mid-career professional with family obligations could manage.

Standing at that crossroads — facing a Master's degree I could not afford, in a profession I had entered without guidance — I found myself asking a simple question: is there a cheaper way to avoid expensive career realignment later in life? The answer was obvious. Prevention costs a fraction of correction. A student who makes an informed course choice before joining university saves years of frustration, thousands of shillings in retraining costs, and the immeasurable toll of circling your purpose without ever landing on it. That question became the foundation of SPAMCER Mentor.

I had spent a decade building competence in a profession I could never legally enter. And the career I had always belonged in — architecture and the built environment — had remained just out of reach my entire life. Not because I lacked talent or work ethic. But because at the one moment it mattered most, nobody was there to guide me.

Even today, my interest in the built environment has never left me. People regularly seek out my skills to design basic house plans and supervise small construction projects — a quiet reminder that the passion I discovered in Form Two was never wrong. It was simply never guided to where it belonged. When I looked around and saw that this same silent struggle was playing out in thousands of students across Kenya, I knew I had to act — not just share my story, but build a solution. That is what SPAMCER Mentor is.

That experience — and the discovery that my story was not unique — gave birth to what is now SPAMCER Mentor. Since 2015, through Coursebook Ventures, I have been providing structured career mentorship to students across Kenya — guiding them toward informed, confident course decisions at every qualification level. The success stories of Joan, Joe, Ryan, Liz, and many others are the fruit of that decade of work. SPAMCER Mentor is the formalised, scaled framework of everything Coursebook Ventures has proven works — now available to every student who needs it.

I had seen, from the inside, what a misplaced course choice truly costs — not just emotionally, but financially, professionally, and in years of life spent circling your purpose without ever landing on it. SPAMCER Mentor exists to change that — because the right guidance, at the right moment, changes everything.