Kenya, Education and Diversity in

Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Kenya

The Republic of Kenya is a country of great inequities manifested as binaries between rich/poor, urban/rural, male/female, and dominant/nondominant ethnicities. The World Factbook of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency provides a sobering portrait. Of Kenya's 41 million people, 50% cannot meet their basic food needs and live below the poverty line. Approximately 40% of the population is unemployed, and 22% live in urban Nairobi and Mombasa. Children aged 0 to 14 years constitute 42% of the population, and primary education is often the only schooling many receive.

In Kenya, political power serves as the principal vehicle for upward social mobility. A theoretical position advanced by Alexander Weinreb is that limited economic opportunity within sub-Saharan Africa, coupled with little political accountability from the outside, enables African leaders to assume the role of patrons who extend their political support to particular cultural and linguistic groups through government expenditure. Since before independence from Britain in 1963 and to the present day, four dominant ethnic groups have competed for control of the state's resources in Kenya. These cultural groups include the Kikuyu (22%) in the Central and Eastern Provinces, Luhuya (14%) in the Western Province, Luo (13%) in Nyanza Province, and Kalenjin (12%) in the Rift Valley Province. Kamba, Kisii, Meru, and other African groups compose 38% of the population, while non-Africans of Asian, European, and Arab descent make up only 1%. In addition, Kenya shelters almost a quarter of a million refugees from Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia.

Besides African leaders, international agencies and organizations have also shaped the economic conditions in sub-Saharan Africa. In Kenya, structural adjustment policies promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s and 1990s shifted responsibility from the government to Kenyan parents to provide for educational expenditures such as school uniforms, fees, and textbooks. These cost-sharing programs manifested themselves in harambee (self-help) schools, which have been funded through the efforts of local communities and parents. Poor households in many of these communities, however, have been unable to raise the necessary funds to meet the fees and levies imposed by schools. Consequently, lower levels of school attendance are evidenced in high poverty areas throughout Kenya. The need for child labor to supplement family income negatively affects school attendance in Nyanza, Eastern, Coast, and Central Provinces.

The education system in Kenya is composed of 8 years of primary school, 4 years of secondary school, and 4 years of tertiary education (8–4–4). The starting age for schooling is 6 years. During the decades when structural adjustment schemes were applied, student enrollment in Kenya declined from 97% to 78%, with less than 50% of children successfully passing the Kenyan Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE), the national examination students take at the conclusion of 8 years of primary schooling. Those most affected by the structural adjustment policies have been children from poor families, informal settlements, and arid and semiarid lands (ASAL), as well as girls. The HIV/AIDS pandemic is a critical factor impacting Kenyan society and its education system as well. A total of 1.5 million Kenyans live with HIV/AIDS, which is a major cause of school dropouts because children are needed to care for sick parents. The 2009 World Bank and UNICEF report, Abolishing School Fees in Africa, estimates that by 2020, almost 12% of all Kenyan children under 15 years of age will be orphaned due to AIDS.

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