They sat exams, got low marks but remain unbowed

The Salvation Army Kenya West Territory officers with a section of Kakamega street children who sat for KCPE under their sponsorship program. [Benjamin Sakwa, Standard]

When KCPE results were released on Monday, Annette Andayo of St Juliet Primary school in Kibra was anxiously waiting.

The circumstances before the exams had been traumatising for her. She had watched her mother’s health deteriorate over the years. Andayo recalls many mornings when her mother would slowly dress up for her job as a cleaner and complain about joint pains.

“I have arthritis, and I am always in pain, but I have to work. It worries my children, but what else can I do?” says her mother Agnes Matayo.

Andayo, 14, says she was always worried. As the exam drew closer, her mother’s condition worsened. All she wished for was for lessons to end so that she could rush home and check on her mother.

Broken dreams

“I had wanted to get more than 300 marks, but only managed 226 marks,” she says. She is hoping for a start over, when she goes to secondary school, to rebuild her broken dreams. 

Her teacher Mr Chris Musonye describes her as a bright student who was let down by life’s circumstances.

“She would have probably scored more if her family situation was different,” says Mr Musonye. He says being a teacher can be heart breaking, as they are often forced to watch dreams of shining stars crush, especially those from low income families

Ms Jane Anyango, director at Polycom Development Project, an NGO in Kibera that works with vulnerable children says every year after the release of national exams, they hear the sad tales of young people who faced difficult circumstances and still managed to sit the exams.

She regrets that children, some as young as 12 years old, walk unaccompanied to their offices, desperately looking for scholarships, but nobody listens to them because their marks are lower.  “When you hear the stories of what they went through, you realise that even though they did not get high marks, they deserve to be celebrated. Nobody reads their stories, and they grow up believing nobody cares,” says Anyango. 

In this year’s KCPE exam, 849,193 candidates scored below 300 marks. Even though they were never publicly celebrated, for some of them, their low marks is a fragment of their bigger story. Some battled learning disorders such as dyslexia that was not diagnosed, others bore the burden of their family’s poverty, while for others, the exam coincided with tragedies that were beyond their little minds. 

Standard on Saturday explores the rarely told stories of students who scored low, but refuse to be bowed by marks.