Whats keeping Kenyan children from school?
Attainment of Universal Primary Education has been a long-term objective for the Government of Kenya (GoK) since independence. But declining gross enrolment rates and completion rates of less than 50 per cent over the past 10 years present a considerable challenge to policy-makers. Why are children dropping out of school? Is poverty solely to blame? A study by the country’s Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, supported by DFID analyses the effects of education cost and stakeholder perceptions of quality on participation rates. This study, the Kenya National Primary Baseline (NPB), incorporated the UNESCO sponsored SACMEQ survey of Kenyan Primary Education. Although primary education is ‘freely’ available in theory, the NPB suggests that parents, on average, pay 60 per cent of the cost of primary education through direct and indirect costs. With 47 per cent of the rural population and 29 per cent of the urban population living below the poverty line, many parents are forced t
