Private schools use classrooms to farm

Upon closing of schools in March after Kenya reported her first three cases of Covid-19, private learning institutions have been experiencing a serious financial crisis.

However, to mitigate their financial circumstances, some have now diversified and are using classrooms and playing fields for various farming activities.

At Roka Preparatory School in Kirinyaga County for instance, rows of spinach sprout in the sports field where the students once played football.

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At the same time clucking chickens fluff their feathers in sawdust-covered classrooms where children once studied and sweated over examinations. “I had to think of how to use the classrooms because they were haunting,” James Kung’u, the school’s director, told this reporter as he tended vegetables in the fields around.

Kungú said the sight of empty classrooms, with no prospects of using them any time soon, bothered him so much that he had to think outside the box.

“When you wake up in the morning and you find the empty classes ‘looking at you’, yet you invested a lot in them and expected them to be generating some income, it is discouraging,” he said.

Kenya’s 11,400 private primary and secondary schools serve about 2.6 million learners according to the Kenya Private Schools Association records.

They vary from bare classrooms charging a few thousand shillings a term to ultra-manicured campuses, serving the nation’s elite.

Peter Ndoro, the association’s chair, said nearly 150 schools have already gone bust. Most of the 158,000 teachers working in private schools are on unpaid leave, he said.

While some schools have been able to oversee distance learning, in others pupils and teachers have no way to connect to the internet.

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