Access to education without learning is great injustice to children in North Eastern

A teacher takes pupils through a lesson under a makeshift classroom in Turkana county. [File, Standard]

Kenya loves to celebrate its education milestones, such as free primary schooling, 100 per cent transition from primary to junior and senior secondary schools, and billions of shillings poured into classrooms. 

But behind the fanfare lies a harsh truth: Thousands of children are in school but not learning. Education should be the ladder out of poverty and inequality. Yet poor quality of education turns it into a trap. A deeper look into the quality dimension reveals glaring inequities that undermine this promise.

According to Usawa Agenda’s 2023 Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Assessment report, only 36 per cent of Grade 4 pupils could both read a Grade 3-level English text and solve a simple numeracy problem. That means nearly two-thirds of children are being left behind by a system that claims to serve them, but really does not. Education justice, therefore, cannot be confined to access alone; it must also grapple with the urgent question of quality.

The injustice runs deeper. In Nairobi, for instance, literacy rates stand at 89 per cent, but in Turkana and Mandera counties, they plummet below 40 per cent. Nowhere is this crisis clearer than in North Eastern Kenya, where schools face crippling teacher shortages. The pupil–teacher ratio there is staggering, 92 learners per teacher in rural schools and 88 learners in urban ones, compared to far lower ratios in the Eastern and Central regions of Kenya.

Add to that, overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated infrastructure, and scarce resources, and the idea of equal opportunity becomes little more than a cruel illusion.

The Competency-Based Curriculum promised change, but without proper training of teachers and support for low-income families, it risks widening gaps instead of closing them. 

Kenya spends about five per cent of its Gross Domestic Product on education, but money alone is not the answer; accountability and equity are. If education is truly the equaliser as all of us are made to believe, we must demand more than warm bodies in the classrooms. Every child must leave school able to read, write, and count. 

Marginalised schools need targeted resources, teachers need real support, and funding must reach where it matters. Until then, our proud talk of ‘access’ is a façade. The real measure of education justice is not whether a child sits in a classroom but whether they leave with the skills to live, work, and dream.