Funding gaps threaten to end two decades of free education in Kenya

New findings have shown that Kenya’s commitment to providing free basic education is currently facing serious financial constraints, with the possibility of an end to free education.

Already, parents are shouldering 50 per cent of the budget for schools, and soon they could be thrust to the centre of financing their children’s education after enjoying more than two decades of the late President Kibaki’s Free Primary School Education, which came into effect on 6 January 2003.

These sentiments were brought to light during a media briefing session by a consortium of children’s rights stakeholders held on 5 June at the Fairview Hotel, Nairobi.

“Parents are already subsidising public education by contributing over 50 per cent of operational costs. This stands in stark contrast to Kenya’s constitutional promise to provide free and compulsory education,” said Elijah Bonyo, Director of Policy and Advocacy, World Vision Kenya.

As this forum was happening, Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Ogamba was delivering a message that shocked the country — he was calling for a review of the financing of schools through a cost-sharing plan.

Ogamba told the National Assembly that parents were among the options the Ministry of Education was considering to plug the huge deficits the Ministry (and schools) were facing.

Currently, the government allocates Sh1,420 per child annually for the FPE programme. The CS said for the first time, the Ministry had failed to provide the full amount to schools.

According to a School Head Report, the total amount owed to schools for the last seven years stands at Sh64 billion, and Sh60 billion in pending bills over two decades.

Ogamba’s presentation shows that children and parents will be affected. The shrinkage in education funding, inflation, the widening pending bills, and the high number of students enrolled in schools, he said, were pushing the government to withdraw the gains of free education.

However, according to a parallel presentation at the Fairview Hotel by Bonyo, there was more to the ongoing crisis than the Ministry of Education’s inability to fund free education as promised.

Bonyo, a policy and children’s budget expert, was breaking down the 2025/26 National Budget, in particular the children’s budget and its implications for children’s rights as stipulated in the 2010 Constitution.

One problematic issue, he said, that has led to underfunding for primary schools is the absence of an established database on national school financing.

“We do not have a centralised system to gather and analyse school budgets nationwide, which renders it impossible to understand the funding gap,” said Bonyo.

He said the lack of an existing database and underfunding by the State Department for Basic Education’s five-year plan is the reason parents are funding 50 per cent of the budget for schools.

The issue, he said, is further complicated by the ongoing underfunding, including an unexplained budget cut of Sh900 million in capitation funding in the present education budget.

This, he explained, is despite the 2005 Economic Survey revealing inconsistency, while schools reported nearly 10 million primary school-age children.

The budget allocation in the current national budget is based on much lower numbers.

“When budgets are cut without explanation (data), and performance targets remain unchanged, the system is set to fail.”

During the forum, participants were presented with a preview of an upcoming Children’s Voices Report, documenting students’ (children’s) firsthand experiences with education challenges.

This, Bonyo said, will provide crucial guidance for advocacy efforts moving forward.

“We are already witnessing a situation where children’s voices on their concerns and the National Treasury’s guidelines in proposed expenditure for their rights are increasingly being overlooked in the budgetary reviews by the National Treasury,” said the expert.

The Alliance brings together World Vision, Plan International, Mtoto News, Child Fund, Terre des Hommes Netherlands, SOS, and Save the Children.

Besides seeking to know what is in store for the country’s minors in the next Financial Year, the Consortium highlights the gaps in the current financial year 2024/2025 budget, which form the ongoing discussions in Parliament.

“We are supposed to ask ourselves, in the context of children’s rights — the right to education, healthcare, clean and safe water, and freedom from hunger — what is the expenditure on those rights?” posed the organisations, who also sought to know whether the children are benefiting from those expenditures,” expressed a participant.

Bonyo urged parents and stakeholders to urgently seek reforms such as enhancing transparency in budget planning, creating a centralised national school financial database, and, most of all, ensuring that children participate in national budget forums and that their voices are included in the reports.

Participants heard that through lobbying by the child-rights consortium, this year, for the first time in the history of the country, children were allowed to participate in all eleven national budget forums that have just been concluded.

“Debate on children’s rights, and specifically education rights, can no longer be ‘ongoing conversations’. It is now time for action,” said Bonyo.

The policymakers, education experts, and civil society representatives present agreed to remain vigilant to the cause of children’s rights as stipulated in the Constitution.

And as the debate rages, it is now emerging that these shortfalls could see parents, after two decades, being forced to finance their children’s education.

Back in Parliament, Narok County Woman Representative Rebecca Tonkei termed the funding gap a source of distress among school administrators.

“How free is education in Kenya? When you promise schools that this money will hit the schools, but it does not hit the account, then do we expect them to run the institutions?” she posed.