Another first from KU: A ‘city within campus’

By EMANUEL WERE

Kenyatta University plans to create the first ‘city within a university’ in Kenya with the construction of a hotel, hypermarket, retail shops and an auto care centre among other services at its main campus.

The plans to construct the infrastructure and create a ‘Uni-City’ will be done in three phases with the first being the construction of a hypermarket, retail shops and auto care centre with a petrol station, according to the master plan which was unveiled this month.  

The second phase will see the construction of a conference centre, banking halls and an office complex while the final phase will be the building of a hotel, recreational facilities and a cinema.

With creation of the ‘Uni-City’, it means KU will be in a position to open up for business and generate extra income with the leasing of the premises.

Land resource

This will give the university a competitive advantage in terms of providing students, lecturers and other professionals with one-stop services within its campus. It will also attract companies to set up their operations and provide services from banking, conferencing to retail facilities in the campus.

The construction will see the university commercialise, by setting up income generating activities, the 400 acres that are ‘underutilised’.  KU is located on the Nairobi-Thika superhighway and sits on 1,000 acres with only 600 acres under use.

The ‘Uni-City’ project is the latest of the university’s transformation under the leadership of Vice-Chancellor Prof Olive Mugenda.

The university’s location on the newly expanded highway also puts it in a prime position to attract more business because of increased population along the superhighway.

The creation of a ‘Uni-City’ will be another significant step for KU, which has set the pace in creating income generating activities for self-sustaining.

Referral Hospital

The university has set up a university hospital mortuary, which is open to the public and generates income for the institution. It has also broken ground and is setting up a teaching, research and referral hospital. The hospital, which will rival Kenyatta National Hospital and Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, will nurture the next generation of doctors apart from catering for the needs of Kenyans.

The introduction of Medicine as a degree course and other nine new courses such as Law, Engineering, Health Sciences and Economics has seen the university, which started out as focused on providing a bachelor’s degree in Education, attract more students.

KU’s growth is tied to the foresight of it being among one of the universities in Kenya to set up a strategic plan, which would drive the governance and growth of the university.  In 2005, it put in place a strategic plan that would run for a decade. The plan was revised in 2008 and 2010.

Also, each department, school and section in the university has a strategic plan aligned to the university’s. KU had a total of 61,946 students by this April, with female students accounting for 45 per cent of the population. This is a tremendous increase from a student population of 15,000 in 2006.  

To accommodate the rising student population KU has come up with an innovative hostel project, which is expected to cost Sh1 billion. The hostels are to be constructed in a model that is known as Build Operate and Transfer (BOT), a favoured model for many public institutions in the West and which is also gaining currency in Africa.

Accommodation

The winning contractor of the tender expected to be awarded in two months, will construct the hostels at the university, operate it for some years to recoup the investment and then hand it back to the university.

It will be the first such innovative model pioneered by a local university and it will come in at a time when many of the public institutions are grappling with the question of accommodating rising student populations.

The dilemma has always been that universities have acres of land but funding the construction of hostels remain a challenge.

With 952 teaching staff KU has one of the best students-to-staff ratio in the country; one lecturer to 65 students. This means students get more focused attention.

To cater for the rapidly growing student population the university has increased its building and amenities with the construction of more lecture halls, a 600-seater students computer centre, a conference centre, student hostels and more laboratories. 

Also, KU has grown tremendously and now has 10 campuses and nine open learning centres across the country. Its recent affiliate is the Machakos University College.

High rating

Even though the university has been rapidly expanding, its quality of education has remained one of the best in the country. In January 2013, it rose 13 places to be ranked 17th in Africa while at the same time maintained its position as the second university in Kenya according to rankings released by Spanish research firm, Webometrics.

The keys to improved performance by the university has been increased volume of research, improved university visibility, courses and facilities offered, Prof Mugenda said in a past media interview. KU was also ranked the best in performance contracts among the State corporations in the 2007/2008 evaluations. In 2010/2011 evaluations it was second best.

The history

The university started out as a Templar Barracks under the British Government before being converted into Kenyatta College in 1965. In 1975, KU became a constituent college of University of Nairobi before becoming a fully-fledged university a decade later.