The Daily Nation recently carried a troubling story: many learners under the Competency-Based Education (CBE) system are not mastering foundational skills.
The reaction has been swift and familiar. Questions about whether CBE was rolled out too quickly. Concerns about teacher preparedness. Debate over assessments and curriculum design. Thoughts about tanking the programme.
These are valid reactions, but they may be missing something more fundamental. CBE does not begin when a child enters Grade 1, or even pre-primary at age four. By then, differences in early development are already shaping how children learn. CBE is built on a simple but powerful premise: children learn best when they are actively engaged. When they communicate, explore, collaborate and regulate their emotions. It moves away from rote memorisation towards competencies like critical thinking and problem-solving.
These are not skills that suddenly appear at age four. They are built in the earliest years of life through responsive caregiving, language-rich interactions, play and safe, stable environments. In fact, research shows that 80 per cent of brain development occurs in a child’s first 1,000 days, long before a child ever steps foot in a classroom.
Yet for many Kenyan children, especially those growing up in low-income communities, these early learning environments are deeply uneven.
In many of Kenya’s informal settlements, the challenge begins even earlier—and more fundamentally—with nutrition. Nationally, about one in five children under age five are stunted. But in low-income urban communities, that figure can rise to around 40 per cent according to a 2023 study.
Stunting is a marker of chronic undernutrition, repeated illness in the earliest years of life, and often comes with lasting effects on cognitive development. By the time many children arrive in pre-primary, they are already working against biological constraints that make learning harder from the start.
To make matters worse, children aged zero to three fall outside Kenya’s education system. And in the absence of affordable childcare, families are forced to make impossible choices: leaving young children with neighbours, in overcrowded informal centres, or even home alone for a few hours.
By the time these children arrive in pre-primary, the gaps are already visible. Some children are chatty and curious, able to follow instructions and engage with peers. Others struggle to sit still, to understand basic language or to participate in structured activities.
And yet, once inside the classroom, they are all met with the same expectations.
This is the misalignment at the heart of the current CBE debate. We are asking this programme to deliver outcomes that depend on investments made years earlier, which, for many children, have not been made.
To be sure, the challenges within CBE itself are real. Teachers need more support and training. Classrooms are often overcrowded. Learning materials are unevenly distributed. But even a perfectly implemented curriculum cannot fully compensate for missing foundations.
A child who has not been exposed to language early on will struggle with reading. A child who has not had opportunities to play and explore will find it harder to engage in inquiry-based learning. A child who has not developed basic emotional regulation will find it difficult to thrive in a structured classroom.
If Kenya is serious about improving learning outcomes under CBE, then the conversation cannot start at age four. It must start earlier.
This means recognising childcare not as a private family matter, but as part of the country’s education and economic infrastructure. It means supporting the thousands of informal childcare providers who are already doing this work—often with little training, oversight or resources —to improve quality and safety.
It means investing in simple, enforceable standards that raise the floor without pushing providers out of the system. And it means ensuring that all children, regardless of where they are born, have access to safe, stimulating, nutritious experiences in their earliest years.
Kenya’s recent moves toward a national care policy signals growing recognition that care is not just a social issue, but an economic and developmental one. It is a promising shift.
