"If you plan for a year plant a seed, for 10 years plant a tree but for 100 years invest in people", so said a Chinese philosopher.
It is this adage the Kenyan government seems to have fully embraced as the clarion call governing its manpower development so as to cope with the emerging global technological trends, become industrialized and realize its national Vision 2030 launched on 10 June 2008.
In this 21st century, aptly dubbed 'the information age', a knowledge society has emerged where information has assumed an unrivalled importance as a resource. Information acquisition and hence knowledge development is what is stirring innovation and creativity whose engines have in turn become the drivers of modern economies.
It is against such background that education and training have become central to the government's overall development strategy. This finds confluence to what Lee Kuan Yew, the venerable patriarch of Singapore once said; that "a trained talent is the yeast that transforms society and makes it rise".
The appreciation of the role of education and training in the overall development of the country's social, economic and political spheres has been underscored by the raft of policies and programs initiated by the incumbent government and its immediate predecessor in the entire education sector.
Up on its inception in 2003, the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) Government rolled out the Free Primary Education Program, a move that saw the enrolment figures surge upwards from 5.9 million in 2002 to 7.6 million by January 2007 (a gross enrolment rate of 105%).
The program was initially marred by numerous challenges including increased teacher to student ratio, inadequate teaching and learning materials, misappropriation of funds by some school heads among others which translated into deterioration of performance as evidenced in the 2004 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results, when only one out of top 100 students came from a public school.
Over the years though, the Kenya Government has continued to improve access, equity and quality of universal primary education by among other things, improving financial management and accountability in schools, rationalizing deployment of teachers, provision of bursary to the poor and the orphaned and expanding and improving learning materials thus inching closer to realizing the twin objectives of access and quality.
The introduction of free primary education in 2003 has ultimately impacted on the secondary education, a scenario the government anticipated when launching the free primary education program. The then Minister for Education Prof. George Saitoti, said the ministry was in the process of developing a secondary education sub-sector strategy. The strategy was intended to increase access to secondary education through expansion of existing secondary schools, establishment of additional day schools, introduction of alternative delivery modes including multi-grade teaching, distance learning and accelerated learning. Besides, the government would provide incentives for the private sector to invest in the expansion of educational facilities for the post-primary level.
In subsequent articles, Infotrack East Africa Ltd will follow up on the implementation of the stated strategy as a way of empowering education entrepreneurs to make investment decisions in post primary and tertiary education institutions.
After the NARC Government took over in 2003, the secondary school enrolment had by 2007 grown by 18.3% from 882,390 students in 2003 to 1,043,467 students in 2006. In 2006 a total of 380,589 students were admitted to Form one, representing a transition rate of 57%. In 2007, the number of candidates admitted to form one was 395,000, which represented a transition rate of 60%. The number is still going up as new schools are being opened. It is to be noted that the transition rate stood at 251,822 students or 46% in 2003. We will analyze the current status in our next article.
The total number of secondary schools also increased significantly from 4,071 in 2003 to 4,506 in 2006 and the number continues to grow, thus leading to further improvements in transition rates. The government intends to sustain and enhance growth in enrolments in order to achieve its target transition rate of 70% by the year 2008. We will keep you informed on the changes on a regular basis.
Within one year, enrolment in Technical, Industrial, Vocational and Entrepreneurship Training (TIVET) institutions grew by 17% from 29,870 in 2005 to 34,903 in 2006 which was a major achievement, given the past stagnation of the sub-sector. This sub-sector is important as it absorbs post primary graduates and youths unable to complete primary or secondary school and fail to transit to higher levels of learning for varied reasons.
The impact of the increased transition rates has ultimately spilled over to the tertiary education level. In the 2007 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams result, for instance, about 60,000 candidates who qualified to join university missed out places in public universities forcing them to explore options in private universities, national polytechnics, technical training institutes, teacher training colleges and others or opting to join private-run commercial colleges. The private commercial colleges are currently experiencing remarkable growth.
The government needs to strongly regulate the setting up of new universities and colleges as well as expanding the existing ones to ensure that Kenyans get higher education and training acceptable anywhere in the world.
In their bid to respond to the bulging need for higher education, public universities have enacted numerous changes in their operations without abdicating their core mission of training high quality human resources and conducting valuable research that address our social, economic and political challenges.
All the universities are running parallel programs concurrently with the regular ones. These programs initially triggered off stiff resistance from regular students as well as education experts who argued that education quality would be sacrificed at the alter of pursuit of additional funds by the universities to plug their budgetary deficits, occasioned by increasingly diminishing government budgetary allocations. The programs have since been embraced, ultimately becoming very popular for their flexibility and convenience to working learners. It is now possible for a large number of Kenyans to finance their own higher education through full time work and part time learning. The pioneer of parallel programs, the University of Nairobi, has successfully run the programs, dubbed Module II, for 10 years.
In the same line, most of these universities have shift programs where students study in an alternating system, a mode that enables more students to access higher education. Besides it has become the in thing for public universities to seek affiliations with mid-level colleges in order to administer their diplomas and degrees through the colleges. That notwithstanding universities are also rehabilitating dysfunctional and abandoned used-to-be public tertiary colleges and transforming them into their constituent campuses. Good examples of such colleges are the Voi and Kenya Science Teachers’ Training Colleges, Mombasa and Kenya Polytechnics.
Indeed the rate at which this symbiotic engagement is being instituted makes it hard work trying to establish how widely a university has spread its tentacles. It also makes it difficult for prospective learners and their guardians to know where specific courses are taught and whether those courses are recognized nationally. Infotrackea.co.ke will help learners and other stakeholders to identify duly registered colleges and universities by providing an updated database of the institutions of higher learning and the nationally accredited courses they offer.
Private universities have also grown tremendously and continue to churn out equally competitive graduates into the labour market. The success stories of among others, Catholic University, Baraton, Daystar and USIU who are fully chartered is manifest testimony that private investment in higher education has come of age. A close look at education quickly reveals that the unification of Africa might be faster and more successful through education rather than politics. However, that is a story for another day.
A substantial number of private universities also have their fair share of higher education business though operating with Interim Letters of Authority. A recent entrant in this category is the Mount Kenya University which has hit the ground running with immediate establishment plans in Southern Sudan and Rwanda. The University’s headquarters is in Kenya’s industrial town of Thika about 40km from the capital Nairobi. In addition to existing universities, the Commission for Higher Education (CHE) is also processing numerous proposals (11 by year 2004) from institutions / sponsors interested in establishing private universities in the country.
The business investment in the education sector in Kenya has no doubt transformed into a thriving multi-billion shilling industry, showing no tell-tale signals of slumping in the near future. The quest for education is at an all time high in almost all levels which augurs well with the country's endeavours towards modernization through high quality manpower training. This in turn calls for an increased participation from private sector in meeting the demand for high quality education at all levels. For a shrewd business person, the bubble in the sector is not about to burst any time soon.
Click on this link to search education institutions in Kenya.
