Corporates should aid needy students

NAIROBI: The Government’s announcement in January that up to 150,000 students who sat the KCPE exams last year would miss places in Form One made headlines and triggered questions about whether the trend should be allowed to continue.

The disclosure by Education Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i came during the selection of students who joined Form One this year.

It is a worrying trend, but if we were to factor in thousands of other bright, young Kenyans who miss out on education because they come from disadvantaged backgrounds, it would surely dawn on us that we are staring at a crisis.

Two months ago, I accompanied Community Scholarship Selection Board (CSSB) members for Equity Bank’s Wings to Fly programme to some parts of the country, during home verification visits.

One of the children visited was Brian Maina who scored 416 marks in last year’s KCPE exams.

The boy lives with his blind grandmother who cannot afford to pay school fees.

In what we can call generational poverty, the grandmother was not able to educate Brian’s mother (her daughter) even after she had performed well and was admitted to secondary school. Brian couldn’t afford secondary school fees.

All this has raised the question of whether we are doing enough in response to such cases as a country.

Certainly, the people who such students turn to; parents, relatives and sometimes neighbours or religious leaders are already overwhelmed, being strugglers themselves or having shared other financial burdens among themselves.

But as we debate the growing number of students who are unable to continue their education for various reasons, some are looking to corporates like Equity Bank that is already catering for a big number of students through its Wings to Fly scholarship programme.

This year, Equity Group Foundation (EGF), which administers the scholarships, received 20,300 applications from needy students who sat for their KCPE examinations last year and are not able to finance their secondary school education.

The high application rate presented an emotional challenge as the Foundation could only absorb a total of 2,000 students this year out of 20,300 applicants.

This brought the total number of scholarships given under the Wings to Fly program to 10,377 in five years.

The biggest challenge was how to allocate the 2,000 scholarships amongt the 20,300 applicants.

But this raised an important question: Is there need for corporates to do more to plug this gap by providing more scholarships to needy students? The answer has to be yes and there is a reason why.

The reason is leadership. Corporates have always stepped in to help and Equity Bank has been a leader on this front for the past five years.

The bank and its partners have routinely paid school fees for more students in the past half-decade than the rest of corporate Kenya combined.

In the age of instant communication and close public scrutiny of corporations, many companies have placed an emphasis on contributing to society, both through community commitments to charity and by making their business practices more socially responsible.

But despite the advances we have made as a country in bridging our social and economic differences, what most people fail to realise is that Kenya’s challenges may have outpaced current philanthropic ventures.

Today, the cumulative wealth of the most generous donors seems a pittance compared with the billions of shillings needed. Generosity is no longer enough.

But consensus is that there is still need to do more.

This is why more individuals, companies and development organisations should join the list of givers and help bridge the gap by providing more resources to sustain more scholarships for needy students.

In the corporate world, as elsewhere, nothing speaks louder than money.

Most Kenyans now reasonably expect corporates to support social causes in a meaningful way and there is no better way to do this other than releasing more cash to pay school fees for needy students.

As a nation, we need to invest more in our youth and their education.

This is the only way to ensure sustainable development and cushion our education system against the shocks that have worsened the transition rates from primary to secondary schools even as the number of pupils sitting KCPE increases each year.