Meet high school principal who learns success from nature

• Principal Clement Nyang’acha draws leadership lessons from nature to guide school improvement.

• He emphasizes working with available resources- students, teachers, and community—rather than comparing the school to better-equipped institutions.

• His philosophy stresses persistence, collaboration, and continuous small improvements as the drivers of lasting success. He also urges schools to treat failure as a resource for growth rather than something to discard.

On the Kisii – Tinga road, off the road stands Kebirigo Boys National School in Nyamira County. It was here, about one year ago, that I met Chief Principal Clement Nyang’acha. The memory remains alive, and the school’s actions are more successful today than before, as he shared the secret of drawing lessons from Nature to lead schools to prosperity.

The meeting did not begin with figures, budgets, or league tables. It began with an observation: a school that had decided to stop measuring itself against what it did not have, and to start working with what it did. In that decision lies a principle older than any management manual, one written into the natural world long before the first staffroom was built.

“Nature does not wait for perfect conditions,” the principal starts as he looks me directly on the face. “The tree on rocky ground does not uproot itself in protest. It sends its roots deeper, finds purchase in crevices, and grows around the stone.” He returns to this image often when speaking to fellow school heads.

A school, he argues, is not built by wishing away its present realities but by extending its roots into them. The students who arrive at the gate, however unpolished, are the rain. The teachers who report for duty, however few, are the soil. The community outside the fence, however skeptical, is the sun. To mourn the absence of better material is to misunderstand the work of cultivation. Material is refined in the process of being worked.

The long experienced principal, who in light moments refers to himself as headmistress because he was a principal of a girls’ school at one time, cautions against the temptation to look outward too well. “A visit to another institution with manicured lawns and functioning laboratories creates the illusion that excellence is imported. What is missed in that glance is the slow, unglamorous work that preceded the view—the years of insisting that time be kept, that books be marked, and that disorder not be normalized.”

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He added that the visible result masquerades as the cause, and the invisible process is forgotten. In that moment, the principal begins to mourn what he lacks rather than to interrogate what he has misused.

Yet no institution thrives in isolation. Air moves across fields without asking permission, carrying pollen and scent from one place to another. A school that locks insight within individual classrooms, that treats good practice as the private property of a single teacher, suffocates itself.

Nyang’acha’s approach has been to open these channels, to ensure that what works in one room is not buried there. When knowledge circulates, standards rise without the need for coercion. When it does not, stagnation sets in, not for lack of intellect, but for lack of exchange.

Persistence operates in the same quiet way. Water does not break the rock with a single strike. It wears it down through consistent pressure. Transformation in a school rarely comes through dramatic interventions. It comes through the daily insistence that lessons begin on time that the compound is kept clean, that courtesy is non-negotiable. These are small things, but they are the water that, over time, carves the stone.

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The keen Principal as he talks to me says that the greatest test is how an institution treats its failures. Nature does not discard decay. It returns it to the soil, where it becomes fertility. A school that expels its struggling students and sidelines its struggling teachers mistakes cleanliness for fertility.

The wiser path is to ask what the failure reveals and how it can be converted into a basis for renewal. Nyang’acha’s admonition is not to lower standards, but to locate them within the reach of present capacity. Begin where you are, with what you have, and refuse to use external comparison as an excuse for internal neglect.

“The schools you admire did not fall from the sky,” he tells me, leaning forward as if to make sure the weight of the words settles. “They were built by men who refused to wait for perfect conditions. They started with cracked desks, with teachers who were tired, with students who had failed before. But they started. They used what was in their hands, and every day they added one more thing.”

He pauses, then adds, “If you keep looking outward, you will die poor in the middle of wealth. Your students are here. Your teachers are here. Your community is here. That is your soil. Work it. Stop being a spectator in your own school.”

The schools that others admire were not built by men who waited for better conditions. They were built by men who refused to wait. Once that work begins, the institution ceases to look outward for validation. It becomes the place others come to observe, not because it imitated them, but because it attended faithfully to its own soil.

To lead a school, then, is to resist the illusion of elsewhere. It is to recognize that prosperity is not imported. It is drawn out—slowly, patiently, and with the conviction that what is within, however modest, is enough to begin.

What’s the biggest resource in your school that you think is being underused right now?

By Enock Okong’o