Though the number of Africa’s out-of-school primary-age children has decreased in the past two decades—halving from 35% in 2000 to 17% in 2019, according to UNICEF—a staggering 98 million youths are still going without an education in the region. Per UNESCO, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest global rates of education exclusion. Reflecting on the alternate paths her own life might have taken without education is what ignited Grout’s passion for schooling-related advocacy work. Born in a rural Chinese village, she was abandoned and placed into an orphanage before being adopted and raised in the US.
“Coming from those rural origins, and then spending most my life in the US and seeing how many opportunities I had because of my access to education here, is really what solidified my desire to pursue philanthropy,” she says. High school seemed as good a time as any to start investing in the cause. Thinking Huts was officially approved for 501(c)(3) status in 2016, when Grout was 16. “I thought to myself, I could do [philanthropy] as a career, even if it might take a bit longer. It’s easy to see, even from something like watching the Olympics recently, that you have to start out so young to get anything off the ground.”
The printing itself is a cinch, but the groundwork has been a heavy lift. After pouring herself into the organization for about seven years, Grout opened the doors to Thinking Huts’ first school in April 2022. Her sights are now set on building a complex of classrooms she’s dubbed a Honeycomb campus, projected to welcome students in summer 2025. Three structures on adjoining hexagonal bases are currently in place as the foundation, and the concept is that with increased enrollment, the footprint is easily expanded. “A lot of times, the nearest school is two or three hours away, and it’s overcrowded, so the children can’t enroll if there’s not space,” Grout says. The students of the Honeycomb campus will largely be children who haven’t had the opportunity to pursue any formal schooling before, as it’s situated in a very remote locale.
