NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
THE POLITICS OF POST-BASIC EDUCATION FOR POVERTY REDUCTION AND GROWTH IN KENYA
By Kenneth King, Hong Kong (Edinburgh)
This analysis of Kenya takes as its starting point an assumption about the transformative potential of education on the economy, but also the very lively concern that this relationship has been flawed in practice. Ruth Kagia, from Kenya and the World Bank, has expressed this succinctly: "The spectacular expansion of education in Kenya in the 70s and 80s has clearly not led to the economic and social gains generally associated with education".This analysis covers 40 years of policy history, examining to what extent some of the following major themes were to be found in the education commissions, working parties, and sessional papers that were related to education, employment and the wider economy: Policy views about the link between education & skills development and economic growth; Policy perceptions of the connections between education & skills development and poverty reduction; Concerns about the quality and learning outcomes of education and training systems; Concerns about the relationships between the education sector and other sectoral developments; Aspirations to provide universal primary education and increasing amounts of secondary education to all young people; Interaction of external aid agencies with Kenya in support of education and skills development.
We have tried here to tease out the tensions between these key themes of Kenya?s own national agenda and the priorities of its principal development partners. The national concerns with the education-and-employment connection and with the orientation of schooling towards skills for work in the formal and informal economies can be contrasted with the aid agency priorities on quality and on education-for-poverty reduction. Equally, national preoccupations have been with the whole of the education and training system ? from early childhood, to technical, to university. By contrast, external donors have frequently prioritised a particular sub-sector such as primary schooling. In the most recent period, 2002 ? 2006, however, we have identified the emergence of common ground between the national and external agendas.
This present summary of the history of policy, including of very recent policy developments both within Kenya and in the international community, has underlined the inescapable complexity of any answer to Kagia's question above. It has, hopefully, clarified the need to examine education in its two-way interactions with many other sectors in the wider environment, and not as a stand-alone sector that can, in isolation, be examined for its direct influence on such crucial issues as productivity, fertility, poverty reduction and growth. It has also affirmed, within Kenya and more generally, the inseparability of the pursuit of basic education from post-basic education. The relationship between basic and post-basic has always been a dynamic one, and never more so than when there has been a political commitment to making primary education universal and free. The review has also noted a rising international concern to place poverty reduction at the centre of the world's development agenda; this focus has been accommodated within Kenyan education policy, and the most recent thinking has laid down ambitious merit-based, pro-poor pathways right through the education and training system. In other words, Kenya has signalled forcefully that there is little point in making just one segment of education, primary schooling, the focus of pro-poor policy. Another thread which runs through Kenya?s policy history has been an awareness of the critical importance of quality and positive learning outcomes. Only too often, we have noticed that the references have been to deficits in quality and very uncertain outcomes. Finally, and intimately connected to quality and outcomes, has been the linkage of education and training to the labour market, both formal and informal, rural and urban. This has been one of the most politically sensitive and frequent reference points throughout the 40 years since independence. It has inspired curricular reform within education and training, and it has also encouraged valuable rethinking of the nature of Kenya's economy, in farms, firms and factories.
This summary also underlines some important deficits in our knowledge base concerning the relations of post-basic education with poverty reduction and growth in Kenya. These are mentioned here in the hope that they may become part of further research on these relationships.
1. The interaction between the donor agenda ? and more generally the international development agenda ? and Kenya on particular education priorities is under-researched.
2. The history of the latest initiative in Free Primary Education, since January 2003, is potentially of great importance to our understanding of basic education and poverty reduction, as a substantial proportion of the 1.3 million new entrants to schooling will have come from families of the poor.
3. Secondary and technical education policy will prove crucial to what happens in primary; and, given the prohibitive costs of moving towards free secondary schooling and technical training, careful evaluation of merit scholarships and pro-poor pathways will be critical to documenting whether bright children from poorer families education. Will even be successfully held in primary schools, let alone be selected to post-basic institutions.
4. There are clearly major gaps, at every level, in our understanding of pupil and student achievement.
5. The utilisation, in work and employment, of knowledge and skills from schools, colleges and training centres is hugely under-researched.
With the rethinking by the new government of the enterprise economy in rural and urban areas, it will be important to be able to chart the interaction between institutional knowledge and the dynamics of the enterprise. This will be especially important if the government is able to move expeditiously on the implementation of both its micro and small enterprise sessional paper and the sessional paper on education and training. If Kenya's ambition to become a knowledge economy by 2020 is to be realised, it will need to know a great deal more than it currently does about its knowledge infrastructure, its systems for capturing and assimilating new knowledge, and its processes for utilising that knowledge in agriculture, industry and within the public sector. In all of these tasks, a fully integrated, high quality, basic and post-basic education and training system will be central.
[For a longer version see the CAS website. See also Balancing basic and post-basic education in Kenya: national versus international policy agenda, forthcoming in the International Journal of Educational Development.]