UF School of Music strengthens global ties through Kenya partnership
Thanks to an educational and cross-cultural partnership that has evolved over nearly 20 years, students in the Master of Music in Music Education (MMME) program at the University of Florida now have front-row seats to the Kenya Music Festival (KMF) — an event so spectacular in scale that it sometimes leaves UF School of Music (SOM) associate professor Marshall Haning, Ph.D. struggling to describe its magnitude.
“The festival is a centerpiece of the cultural calendar in Kenya. It’s this huge, almost incomprehensible thing. It’s just massive,” Haning said.
Overseen by Kenya’s Ministry of Education, the KMF is a tiered competition that starts at the sub-county level, spanning the entire East African nation, and culminates in a two-week national festival each summer.
More than 140,000 of Kenya’s top student performers — selected from an estimated three million or more participants competing at local and regional levels; starting as young as pre-kindergarten and ranging up to the university level — participate in the KMF national tier, which includes 600 competitive categories spanning music, dance and elocution.
In recent years, School of Music graduate students have utilized grant funding from the MMME Online program to travel to Kenya to attend the KMF.
Some Gator graduate students even find themselves in a very front-row seat: at a piano bench, filling in as accompaniment for festival competitors. Others have been invited to the adjudicators’ table. Wherever their participation takes them, the KMF grants flexible opportunities for MMME students to immerse themselves in the festival as both observers and participants.
“Our students get to interact with the musicians and the conductors and with the festival officials to learn about all the different cultural music, ranging from traditional Kenyan to Arabic to Western, and about the different types of performances and the structure of the festival. Because it’s such a huge event, there are all these different pieces of it that they’re observing, or even participating in, and those pieces tend to ebb and flow throughout the festival,” Haning noted.
Educational exchange brings top Kenyan talent to Florida to lead Africa Choir
Gators attending one of the top arts and cultural events in East and Central Africa is just one component of an educational exchange that has for nearly two decades brought Kenyan musicians and music educators to the UF School of Music.
In 2007, School of Music Professor Emeritus Russell Robinson, Ph.D., initiated an “institutional linkage” program with Nairobi’s Kenyatta University that brings Kenyan postgraduate students to UF pursue their Ph.D. and deepen their professional development.
Duncan Miano Wambugu, a Kenyatta University lecturer, was the first student to participate in the educational exchange. While working toward his Ph.D. in Music Education, Wambugu helped launch and served as the founding director for UF’s Pazeni Sauti Africa Choir in 2009.
“The choir was an instant success for Duncan Miano Wambugu, [who is] now Dr. Wambugu … over 50 UF students were practicing African choral music every week and it was a true multicultural student choir with UF students from Africa, Asia, Europe and the U.S. participating,” Robinson said.
“The choir had annual concerts in the University Auditorium to packed audiences. It was the real music of West, South and East Africa. They also did impromptu performances outside on campus. We had other choirs and singing from different countries, but this was the first to sing authentic choral music from Africa at UF … I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to be the faculty sponsor for this group, through three Ph.D. students who finished the program, and my 12 years with them until I retired in 2016,” Robinson added.
After completing his Ph.D. in Music Education at UF, Wambugu returned to Kenya, where he is currently Lecturer of Music and past Chair of Music and Dance at Kenyatta University, as well as a member of the Kenya Music Festival’s executive committee.
Since the founding of the institutional linkage program, which is supported by funding from the University of Florida Office of the Provost, UF School of Music has hosted five Ph.D. students from Kenya, each of whom has directed the Pazeni Sauti Choir as a requisite of the educational exchange.
Abbey Chokera, Ph.D., succeeded Wambugu as the second student in the institutional linkage program and has since gone on to serve as Deputy Director at the Kenya Permanent Presidential Music Commission. Chokera’s successor in the program, Elijah Adongo, Ph.D., is currently Lecturer of Music at Kenyatta University. The fourth and most recent graduate of the program, Eric Koome Murianki, Ph.D., is currently pursuing additional studies in music therapy at the University of Kansas.
Ph.D. candidate Kevin Kimtai is the current director of the Pazeni Sauti Choir as he pursues his doctorate in Music Education at UF.
Expanded partnership sends SOM faculty, students to Kenyan universities, national festival
Following Robinson’s retirement in 2016, Haning joined the School of Music and picked up the thread Robinson initiated with the cross-continental exchange with Kenyatta University.
Haning also connected with the Technical University of Kenya (TU-K), which in 2023 invited him to serve as the keynote speaker for a graduate research symposium. Six SOM graduate students joined Haning and presented their research at the symposium. In 2024, Haning returned to Kenya with SOM faculty colleagues Barry Hartz and Thaddaeus Bourne to lead a series of clinics in K-12 public schools and lectures at Kenyatta and TU-K.
“One of the things that’s always very striking for me when I go to Kenya is seeing the contrast between the infrastructure and facilities that they have access to and the products that they put out. They turn out incredible musical products,” Haning said.
“I think something that’s really valuable for our students to see is that there are different parts of the world where people don’t have access to all the resources that we do — but they still manage to make incredible music, and to do really cool things.”
Haning attended the Kenya Music Festival with graduate students from UF’s online and on-campus music education programs 2024 and 2025.
“It’s something that provides a really great intercultural learning experience. They get to hear a lot of traditional Kenyan music … They also get to see what music education looks like in different parts of the world, and because Kenya is a relatively young country, they get to see how these educational institutions function in a part of the world that is still very much developing,” Haning said.
Haning says that while he and his students spend most of their time observing the festival, they also have flexible opportunities for hands-on involvement — whether it be filling in on piano accompaniment, participating in clinics with the performers, observing and assisting the festival’s judging panels, or presenting their scholarly work in the KMF’s symposia-structured events.
UF Online MMME student Anthony Kaburu lives in Kenya and has participated in the KMF since his early adolescence — but attending the festival as a University of Florida Gator was an entirely new experience.
“It was really great to be at KMF this year — not just on my own, but with the support of UF — and to represent this program. It was great to attend the national workshops and interact with several scholars on different music-related subjects. I also really enjoyed getting to meet my classmates and interacting with them for the week,” Kaburu said.
“Being an online program, this was a rare and great opportunity for us to share our experiences in the program, and our diverse musical cultures, as well, together … It is always a great pleasure to share the rich cultural context of Kenyan folk music and dances with friends from across the globe, and I think that, too, was worthwhile,” Kaburu added.
UF COTA, New World School of the Arts invite KMF winners to Miami
Currently, Haning says the College of the Arts is working to sponsor performance categories at the 2026 Kenya Music Festival. He says that he also hopes that, in addition to bringing UF students to next year’s festival, UF will be able to bring the Kenya Music Festival to Florida, too.
“We have issued a formal invitation from the University of Florida to host winning groups from the festival to perform at New World School of the Arts in Miami in conjunction with [the College of the Arts’] partnership with NWSA,” Haning said.
“It will provide the opportunity for the [Kenyan] students to interact with the high school and college students at NWSA and to share ideas in both directions. It also allows them to perform in Miami, which is a vibrant city with so many great opportunities — and NWSA has many connections with venues down there — so, we’re really excited about providing an opportunity to help internationalize the festival through the partnerships that we have in place.”
Kaburu underscored the value of the UF School of Music’s institutional linkage with educational institutions in Kenya and the national festival.
“Stories like mine are the epitome of UF-KMF partnerships — not just theoretical deductions, but practical ones; of lives that will be transformed for the better through access to quality education,” Kaburu said.
“This master’s program has given me access to a high standard of higher education that challenges me to be better in all spheres of my musicianship. I hope that it continues to open doors for further career development opportunities and elevates my skills. I hope many more Kenyan students can enroll into the MMME program and go through it successfully.”
UF students and faculty who are interested in participating in this ongoing work in Kenya are encouraged to reach out to Marshall Haning at mhaning@ufl.edu for additional information.
Learn more about the Kenya Music Festival and the UF Pazeni Sauti Choir:
KenyaMusicFestival.com
Africa.ufl.edu/Pazeni-Sauti-Choir