Just recently, President Kenyatta made a call to private universities to be open to admit the government-sponsored students. Consequently, the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) has announced that an additional 10,000 people, out of the 2015 KCSE candidates, will gain admission into the tertiary system. If that happens, KUCCPS says, the total number that would be admitted this year will go up by about 13% to 84,389. The move is commendable. But before we celebrate, let us go back a year or two from today.
According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (Kenya Facts and Figures, 2015) the number of primary school enrolment stood at close to 10 million pupils: 9,857,600 to be precise. For the year 2014, that number went up slightly to 9,950,800 for statistics released in 2015. Two subcategories constitute the figures 9,857,600 or 9,950,800: the net enrolment ratio (NER) and gross enrolment ratio (GER).