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In school but not learning

In my article today I’m going to share with you how Prof. Olubayi Olubayi cried on my shoulder about the terribly low pass rate for the Kenya National Examinations Council’s (KNEC’s) Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations. It’s been bothering him for a long time, and he has now shown me the evidence which, with his academic scrupulousness, he has been compiling.

The KCSE pass mark is C+, which is usually less than 50% of the score in a subject. Prof Olubayi has been studying the KNEC website and media reports on the issue, and here’s the sad reality: since 2016, 80% of Kenyan children fail their KCSE after twelve years of schooling, meaning only two out of ten students pass. This with the exception of 2017 and 2018, when only one out of ten passed.

“Imagine a business that manufactures products,” Prof Olubayi lamented, “but where only two out of ten are good enough to sell. How long would such a business last?” That is the situation in Kenya, despite our hugely expensive public education system. The Government spends approximately 20% of its annual budget on this broken system, with the amount allocated for 2023/2024 being Shs.628 billion.

He went on to explain that there are many reasons for this mass failure – while adding that solutions do exist. Kenya has achieved near universal school attendance, but not universal learning, which reminded me of how the difference between diversity and inclusiveness has been described: diversity shows an invitation to the party, while inclusiveness sees you being invited to dance.

Prof. Olubayi concluded that the country is funding failure, where the victims are the majority of children, inevitably resulting in lowered development potential for the country.

If you ask Kenyans, whether well-educated professionals or ordinary citizens, to guess the pass rate for KCSE – as Prof Olubayi has been consistently doing – most suggest 70% or 80%. But as we see, the reality is very different. Sadly, most of the 20% who pass went to private primary schools or academies for their foundation primary schooling of Grades 1 to 3. Almost all the children of the truly poor, who cannot afford private primary schools, simply fail after attending school for twelve years. They attend, but they do not learn.

On January 20th 2023, the Nation ran the headline “The majority of 2022 KCSE students get low grades”. It was referring to the results that had just been officially announced by the CS Education, who stated that only 173,345 out of the 881,416 students who’d sat the Grade 12 (Form Four) national examination had passed with a C+ or above. This translates to a 20% pass rate, where C+ is the minimum Grade 12 national examination score that qualifies one to study for a degree programme at a university.

The low pass rate of only 22% for 2023 is the highest in the last 8 years. By comparison, in Mauritius – which has the best education system in Africa – the pass rate for the school certificate examination in 2022 was 78%. The pass rate in Malaysia is 55%. The percentage of students passing GCSE in the UK with a grade of C or higher was 73%, and those attaining a grade of A or A+ was 26% – which is higher than those passing with a C+ or higher in Kenya. In France, the pass rate for the baccalaureate is usually around 80%.

It is for these reasons that in 2012 Prof Olubayi created Kiwimbi, an NGO learning centre focused on interventions to raise the pass rates in primary and secondary schools in Kenya.

There they use the “Teach at the Right Level” (TaRL) method of the Indian NGO Pratham, in combination with “spaced-repetition”, a learning technique typically performed with flashcards, and they are obtaining excellent results. In the 2023 KCPE results one of the primary schools next to Kiwimbi in Amagoro had more than half the students score more than 300 points – a performance as good as that of our best private primary schools. The same methods are being deployed elsewhere in rural western Kenya, with similarly encouraging results in secondary schools.

Other interventions include persuading principals of selected boarding schools to respect the science of learning by allowing students to sleep for 8 hours, removing calculators, promoting general reading, and tutoring students in small groups.

Learn more about how kiwimbi operates and the impact it has been achieving by going to their website, www.kiwimbi.org. And beyond just browsing it, how can you help it to go to scale in its mission of transforming our pass rates? Surely together we can do so much better.

Kianda at 60 is a story of empowerment of girls

Last month the Kianda Foundation celebrated its 60th anniversary through a virtual event at which the keynote speaker was the chairperson of the Foundation, Olga Marlin. No one could have been better placed to play that role, as she was one of the four determined ladies who launched this pioneering initiative for educating African girls and women in Kenya.

Olga Marlin was a young education graduate from University College, Dublin when she was told that Opus Dei wanted to contribute to the development of women in Kenya. She and her young colleagues, all in their mid-twenties, came here in 1960 at a time when African women enjoyed no access to quality education – in stark contrast to their white counterparts in colonial Kenya.

For the four women the institution would have to be multi-racial and inter-ethnic from the start, a place where the different races and ethnic groups could get to know and appreciate one another. It had to be open to students of all creeds – Catholic as well as non-Catholic, and even non-Christian.

Kianda College was the first project of the Foundation, offering training in secretarial and business studies, the only one of its kind at that time. And the name ‘Kianda’, meaning a ‘fertile valley’ where everything flourishes, was proposed by one of its great supporters, Jemimah Gecaga (the first African Woman in the Legislative Council and the first woman MP).

Opposition to such an institution was rife due to racial segregation, with some white parents refusing to send their daughters to the same school as African girls, and at a time when the general feeling was that Africans lacked the capacity to study to the level of their white counterparts.

Another speaker at the 60th anniversary celebration was the first African student to attend Kianda College, Evelyn Mungai (now my wife), who graduated in 1962. She told the e-gathering that with independence imminent Africanisation began, and she became one of the first African women to be employed in government at a professional level.

Margaret Curran, another of the founding four of the Kianda Foundation, took her in hand to go to offices for interviews. At one of these, my wife recalled, the white man responsible for recruitment (most such people at the time were white men), could hardly believe that an African could handle professional jobs, as they had never been exposed to one who was suitably qualified. Yet when Evelyn Mungai completed his test he could see that this was indeed possible.

Kianda College set the pace for other Kianda Foundation projects, including Kibondeni College, which in 1967 became Kenya’s first women’s hospitality college. Ten years later Kianda School opened, following requests from former students of Kianda College who wanted the same level of quality all round education they had received for their daughters. One of the first students at the school was First Lady Margaret Kenyatta, who is also the patron of the Kianda School Alumni Association.

Over the years, other educational institutions have been established, including Kimlea Girls Technical Training in Kiambu (which saved hundreds of girls from the child labour that was rampant on the coffee plantations there), Tewa Technical Training Centre in Kilifi County and other education centres in Nyeri, Kisumu and elsewhere. The Foundation also runs other projects, including Kimlea Clinic, Faida Youth Centre, Fanusi Study Centre and Kimlea Business Centre. In addition, they also organise social initiatives such as the Children’s Health Programme, and promote women entrepreneurs among low income women through the Business Women Support Programme.

Their focus is now on strengthening the existing institutions to ensure that the students receive the best education possible. Given that the Kianda institutions and programmes are highly subsidised to ensure that even the most disadvantaged have a chance at quality training, to support them the Kianda Foundation Ambassadors was launched this year. Through it, well-wishers offer monthly financial support towards scholarships and to allow more girls to benefit from formal and vocational courses, plus reaching more women for entrepreneurship training.

Unthinkable as it is today, where women have broken so many glass ceilings here in Kenya as elsewhere, it’s good to be reminded how dramatically different opportunities were for them only 60 years ago. And learning about the heroic role played by Olga Marlin and her colleagues at the Kianda Foundation I saw how critical their pioneering efforts were.