Kenya | Education Sector

NAIROBI, Oct 17 (NNN-KNA) -- The Kenyan government has set aside sh. 980 million to equip schools in all the 210 constituencies of the country.

Basic education Permanent Secretary (PS) Prof. James Ole Kiyiapi said that 300 computers will be purchased in each constituency, in the current financial year, to promote ICT integration in learning and teaching.

The PS said 240 secondary schools would benefit from multimedia laboratory projects, adding that the ministry was in the process of installing the facilities.

Prof. Kiyiapi who was speaking at Mayori secondary school in Mbeere South District during a prize giving day, urged schools to adopt innovative use of ICT to drive teaching and learning process.

"I expect all schools to put this heavy government investment into good use in content delivery by making ICT a way of life," he said.

The PS who was flanked by government chief pathologist Dr. Moses Njue said more money had been invested to improve infrastructure in schools under the economic stimulus project.

Each constituency, he said, has received Sh30 million to create a centre of excellence and a further Sh7 million to cater for two model primary schools.

Prof. Kiyiapi noted that enrolment in secondary schools has risen from 1.03 million students in 2007 to 1.6 million this year after the introduction of free day secondary education where Sh 43 billion has been disbursed so far.

He, however, discouraged schools from buying expensive gifts to entice students to work hard terming the habit as reverse motivation.

"Students should never be bribed to work hard. The ministry of education does not encourage such," he said adding that learning was the only business students have in schools.

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NAIROBI, Oct 17 (NNN-KBC) -- Kenya Higher Education minister William Ruto has said he will not resign over Sh96m fraud charges he is facing.

Addressing a press conference Saturday, the Minister alleged political vendetta stating that he was not a beneficiary of the transaction and that he never received money from Kenya Pipeline Company.

The Minister whose career is on the line following the Friday court ruling claims the Ministry of Lands sold the land to KPC adding that the payment was made by cheque to several people who can easily be traced. "Kenya Pipeline can say who they paid," Ruto said.

Ruto pointing a finger to his political enemies wondered why the case had been delayed only for him to charged alone.

He further said there was nothing to make him step aside. "I was elected in 2007 as the Eldoret North MP when the case was in court. I was appointed a minister in 2009 when the case was pending and sworn in under the new Constitution in September, so there is nothing new."

On Friday, the constitutional court ruled that the minister has a case to answer over the controversial sale of the Ngong forest land to the KPC nine years ago.

The Minister had moved to court to block the fraud case arguing that it was a violation of his fundamental rights and was also meant to curtail his political ambitions.

In their ruling Justices Roselyne Wendoh, Leornard Njagi and Jeanee Gacheche said if Ruto has any issues to object to, then he should raise them at the trial court.

The judges said in the ruling that Mr Ruto's attempts were only meant to pre-empt the criminal charges yet the Minister will have a chance of mounting his defence before the trial magistrate.

Through his lawyer Katwa Kigen, Ruto further argued that 16 government institutions that facilitated the transfer of the land in question have not been prosecuted.

The Eldoret North MP and Berke Commercial Agencies, a company associated with him, a former aide of retired president Daniel Moi, Joshua Kulei, and two other firms were jointly sued for allegedly obtaining money from KPC between August 6 and September 6, 2001.

Section 62 of the Anti-corruption and Economic Crimes Act stipulates that "a public officer who is charged with corruption or economic crime shall be suspended at half pay, with effect from the date of the charge."

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Abigael Ndung’u attends Male Secondary School, with the hope that one day as an adult she’ll make enough money to support her family.

School children stroll along dusty, gutted roads on their way to a better life in central Kenya.

Their hopeful journey begins early. The sun has yet to rise over the peaks of Mount Kenya, looming not far in the distance from where these rural destitute children live.

Abigael Ndung’u, 18, is awake at 5:30 a.m. inside the tiny home she shares with her parents, one sister and six brothers. After making sure her striped tie looks presentable beneath her uniform vest, Abigael sets off for the one-hour walk to Male Secondary School.

Breakfast, consisting simply of tea, is there for her when she arrives. The four teachers are ready to teach the basics at 7 a.m., after making a similar arduous trek themselves on foot.

Abigael learns agriculture, chemistry, math, English, history, education and Christianity, and at 5 p.m., she heads back to the family farm.

One day, she’d like to be a journalist.

Hope seems to shine from her charcoal-coloured eyes. It’s her goal, she says, to be able to support her parents, who are farmers.

“I will be very happy,” she says, tears welling up in her eyes.

More than 40 people, from British Columbia to Ontario, are touring with A Better World Canada’s Eric Rajah of Lacombe to see what improvements can be made at Abigael’s school and the neighbouring Male Primary School.

This week, the Canadian group officially opened two classrooms, financed by Lacombe’s Jim and Linda Guilbault, at Male Secondary.

The Kenyan government was spurred by the Canadians' actions to build two classrooms. The parents have built a third one. The 159 students have a more comfortable area in which to learn, including concrete floors instead of dirt ones.

Without these classrooms, the secondary school headmaster said the girls would end up being househelpers and/or face early marriages.

At Male Primary School, Red Deer’s Pat and Bev Romerman beamed as they officially opened two more classrooms they invested in. Primary headmaster Joseph Patrick Gichuki said children had little motivation to go to school because they were learning inside wooden clapboard shacks where rain could pour through. Now, even the ones who quit school a couple years ago are returning to the school with nine new classrooms built by A Better World and Romerman’s family and engineering business.

Charles Muragurr, project co-ordinator for Northern Kenya, ensures the community is on board with the project and that labour and material costs are up to snuff. When the projects are finished, they will benefit generations for years to come, he said.

Still, challenges exist in so many ways, they seem insurmountable.

The teachers have so few textbooks that they lend their own out to students for the night. Inside a wooden shack, four teachers quietly prepare for their students’ national exams. The room is dark except for sunlight peeking through the boards and doorway.

“We have very few teachers so we don’t have time to prepare,” said teacher Sabina Wamuyu.

Jairus Gichuhi Muthle manages school resources inside a sparse office where a plastic kitchen tablecloth has been tacked onto one wall. Cooking fat from the kitchen is stored in one corner. He sympathizes with the parents who can’t afford the school lunches, infrastructure maintenance and to hire additional teachers. Secondary students, Grade 9 through 12, are required to pay for schooling while Primary schooling is free.

“We are so squeezed financially,” he said. “We don’t get enough from the government.”

Over at Male Primary School where 412 children as young as five-years-old attend, the wish list is similarly endless.

John Horsey, chairman of the secondary school, appealed for water and electricity from Rajah’s team.

While Mohamud Ali, senior education officer for the district, voiced appreciation for what A Better World has done, he added that the need is great, including for a library, science lab and proper offices.

Rajah replied the priority is more classrooms and that this wish list will be addressed when the appropriate time comes. This includes drilling a water well next January for school and community use.

“We cannot build everything at once because the community has to invest into it,” said Rajah.

A Better World will continue its journey over the next 12 days, including grand openings of several other schools.

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Some Kenyan university students are completing their courses without having interacted with a professor, a new survey has found.

The study of staff establishment in the universities shows there is an acute shortage of professors at a time when the higher education sub-sector is experiencing exponential growth.

It has also emerged that a number of master’s and doctoral students in some of the universities are being supervised by their peers, putting into question the quality of higher education in the country.

This contravenes international standards that require academic staff to hold qualifications one level above those they teach.

New data from the Commission of Higher for Education (CHE) show that some universities offering degree and master’s programmes have no academic staff who have attained professorship.

Professors’ role

The worst affected are the private universities, some of which have no professors, or when they have them, their number does not exceed 10. And even at that level, the role of the professors is administrative rather than academic or research-based.

The increase in university colleges has heightened the crisis, and at least four universities do not have a single professor.

There are only 352 professors in the country’s 30 universities serving a student population of 200,000.

The University of Nairobi has the highest number of professors at 110, followed by Moi University (49), Kenyatta (29) and Maseno (17). Jomo Kenyatta, Egerton and Masinde Muliro universities have 11 professors each.

All but two private universities have fewer than 10 professors; United States International University has 14 and the Kenya College of Accountancy has 15.

“The situation is bad,” said CHE chief Prof Everret Standa.

Prof Standa said every department of a university should have two or three professors who have special knowledge of the specific subjects offered there.

“Professors are supposed to be the academic leaders in the universities to guide junior academic staffers and lead in research and advancing knowledge frontiers,” he said.

Asked about the implications of the lack of such academic staff, Prof Standa said academic standards in the country would decline because university education is supposed to be more research-oriented and to help solve social problems.

“This is one of the reasons why we are conducting the human resources audit in the universities to understand exactly what goes on there,” Prof Standa said.

Although the commission is charged with maintaining standards in higher education, Prof Standa noted that legally the universities are supposed to be autonomous and self-regulating.

But the role of the CHE is hindered by the fact that public universities are independent entities formed by an Act of Parliament, and the power of the commission to curb sub-standard practices is limited.

University colleges such as Narok, Meru, Mombasa Polytechnic and Multimedia fall short of the criteria the CHE stipulates where departments should be headed by professors, or at least associate professors employed on permanent terms.

Other universities that have no professors in their classrooms are St Paul’s, Presbyterian University of East Africa, and Kenya Highlands. Kiriri Women’s and East African School of Theology also have none.

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Nairobi — The Ministry of Education lost some Sh318 million meant for free primary education from 2005 to 2009 through dubious imprests and outright fraud, a government audit report says.

This consists of Sh248 lost in June 2009, whose discovery prompted an expanded audit.

The audit revealed an additional Sh70 million relating to imprests, whose documentation is yet to be provided.

Initially, Finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta said the Internal Audit Department (IAD) had determined that Sh8.4 billion did not meet the forensic audit test, but the figure has since been scaled down after the Education ministry provided documentation for Sh3.5 billion.

The report also found that Sh2.2 billion was lost due to foreign exchange fluctuations while IAD was also verifying the Sh1.9 billion that available documentation indicates was part of the transfers to schools.

Mr Kenyatta said the audit focused on 512 schools, which, on the basis of risk assessment, accounted for 75 per cent of the issues that required detailed investigation.

However, the schools audited consist of under two per cent of the 26,000 schools and institutions that receive support under the Kenya Education Sector Support Programme (Kessp).

"It is important that for the four- year period, the funds appropriated to Kessp and which are the subject of forensic audit amounted to Sh489 billion, made up of Sh480.4 billion being Government of Kenya funds and Sh8.9 billion contribution from our development partners," Mr Kenyatta said.

The IAD revelations have prompted the international development groups that were funding the Free Primary Education Programme to call for prosecution of those responsible.

UK Secretary for International Development Andrew Mitchell said the findings were "shocking and completely unacceptable".

"We will go after every penny of British taxpayers' money that has been stolen and those responsible for fraud must be prosecuted through the Kenyan courts.

"The British Government will not tolerate corruption," said Mr Mitchell in a statement read on his behalf by Alistair Fernie, the head of the Department For International Development in Kenya.

World Bank country director Johannes Zutt, who read a joint statement by partners in the Joint Financing Agreement for the Kenya Education Sector Support Programme, said the donors were "worried" about the extent of loss.

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mwanamwiwa said:

lol Kenyans!
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oshon said:

Great to see a culture where intellectualism is cellebrated. I wish it was like this in black America but it is just the exact opposite.

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kijana said:

Does anyone know how far Kenya has reached in terms of modernizing the elementary and secondary schools? because i am tired fo seeing those wood benches and chock-boards.

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A little over 15 years ago, 61, year-old Kauchi Chivumba attended the 4th world women's conference in Beijing, China. A quote by one of the speakers the then UNICEF Executive Director Ms Carol Bellamy marked the beginning of a new phase in her life.

Bellamy's quote read, "...Among the world's 130Million out-of-school children, girls outnumber boys 2:1, and women still account for two thirds of the world's nearly one billion illiterate adults,...we who have the advantages of education and take for granted the education of our children and their children, know that a girl's education is not luxury-it is a human right and an urgent development priority, we all agree that this is so, let us now move to make it happen."

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President Mwai Kibaki has expressed confidence that the Government is firmly on the track towards attaining the goal of universal education through collaboration with development partners.

President Kibaki was speaking Thursday at State House Nairobi where he officially launched a project in support of primary school education in Kenya funded by the Chinese business community.

The initiative dubbed ‘China-Africa Hope Project' is undertaken by the World Eminence Chinese Business Association through the China Youth Development Foundation and targets to construct 10 primary schools in various parts of the at cost of one million dollars.

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6-6-3 proposed to replace 8-4-4

Kenya’s education system could be changed from 8-4-4 to 6-6-3 if proposals by a government team are adopted.

Under the envisaged structure, pupils will spend six years in primary schools and sit a national examination at the end before joining secondary schools for another six years.

Students will then proceed to universities where they will spend three years pursuing degree programmes, having specialised in particular courses at the secondary school level.

The Task Force on the Re-alignment of Education Sector to the Constitution says the “6-6-3 (system) has provided quality education and training in countries ranked highly and have accelerated development”.

According to the report of the taskforce, the 6-6-3 system of education will allow learners to choose areas of specialisation and develop them early enough unlike the current 8-4-4.

“The proposed system of education will encourage high level of specialisation geared towards attainment of Vision 2030 goals of industrialisation and entrepreneurship,” it says.

The system will also improve competencies, skills and innovation for the world of work, says the taskforce that is chaired by former Moi University Vice-Chancellor Douglas Odhiambo.

If adopted, the change will be the third after the 1985 switch from a 7-4-2-3 system to the 8-4-4 one following recommendations by a presidential commission.

Critics of the 8-4-4 arrangement argue that it is steeped in rote learning where learners are taught to pass examinations instead of going through a holistic education.

In reviewing the 7-4-2-3 system, the presidential commission had noted that it had created academics and theoreticians who depended on white collar jobs.

The rationale behind the 8-4-4 system was, therefore, to offer practical education, thereby produce self-reliant graduates.

The taskforce has also recommended that the free primary and day secondary school education money that the government provides be increased. A primary school pupil under the proposal will be allocated Sh2,371, up from Sh1,020 per year, while those in the day secondary schools will get Sh30,766, up from Sh10,260 a year.

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hakz2007 said:

Scandal of Kenyan universities without a single professor
http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Scanda... single professor /-/1056/1048328/-/rv54pq/-/

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EDUCATION minister Sam Ongeri has dismissed reports that national examinations for primary and secondary schools will be abolished. Ongeri appeared to differ with Education PS James Ole Kiyapi who a week ago said national examinations will be scrapped. "Kenyans need not be worried on calls to have the examinations abolished. The reports are inaccurate and were personal opinions," Ongeri said.

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