Every year, the government pours more than Sh700 billion into education. It is the single largest item in the national budget. Nearly a third of all the money collected from taxpayers eventually finds its way into classrooms, universities, examinations, teacher salaries, capitation grants and educational administration.
Families then add their own contribution in the form of development fees, transport costs, remedial tuition, boarding expenses, uniforms and endless “top-ups”. Entire households organise themselves around school fees: land and livestock are sold, savings are emptied, and loans are taken to finance education.
Many Kenyans are beginning to crack under this pressure, hence the discussions this week about the cost of education, justified especially by the new emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem).
Education in Kenya is no longer merely a public service. It is a national obsession financed jointly by the taxpayer and individualised parental anxiety – and quite understandably so. For decades, education has represented the closest thing Kenya possesses to a social covenant. It promises mobility, dignity and escape. Schooling has remained the legitimate pathway out of poverty and insecurity.
Education should not feel like a lottery. Yet increasingly, that is exactly what it looks like. When a country invests this heavily – financially, emotionally and politically – education cannot become a giant experiment driven by fashionable slogans and bureaucratic optimism.
Kenya already produces large numbers of graduates into an economy struggling to absorb existing skilled labour. Around the world, even technical professions are being disrupted by automation, outsourcing and precarious employment. The future economy may reward adaptability and creativity as much as narrow technical expertise.
Yet Kenya’s policy imagination is moving in the opposite direction. There is a renewed national enthusiasm in Kenya, where every official speech is delivered in the seductive language of the future: coding, robotics, artificial intelligence, digital jobs, innovation ecosystems and the knowledge economy. Kenya must become the “Silicon Savannah”.
The classrooms that are eating up a third of the national cake, and then some, tell a far less triumphant story. For decades, Kenya has been struggling with the teaching of mathematics and sciences. Yet, nationally, the country continues to perform acts of symbolic optimism such as adding the words “science and technology” to the names of universities, as though this could compensate for weak foundational outcomes. Out of more than 600,000 university students in Kenya, only a small proportion (100,000) are enrolled in Stem-related programmes – and many of those are studying to become teachers.
Despite decades of investment in mathematics and science education, Kenya still struggles to produce consistently strong results in these very subjects. Part of the problem is that not all Kenyan schools inhabit the same universe. Some students learn in schools with functioning laboratories, internet, manageable class sizes and specialised teachers. The majority encounters science through broken equipment, overcrowded classrooms and practical lessons taught by employing the imagination because the laboratory has no chemicals. It becomes difficult to imagine how such conditions can consistently produce scientific confidence or technical excellence.
No one can argue with the ambition to strengthen foundational competence in mathematics and sciences, regardless of eventual career paths. Science education is not valuable only for producing future engineers. A society benefits immensely when there is widespread scientific literacy among its citizens – even if they become journalists, lawyers, artists, teachers or entrepreneurs. Mathematics teaches reasoning; science teaches evidence and inquiry. Both are civic competencies and not merely labour-market skills.
Yet, innovation rarely emerges from technical knowledge alone. The modern economy runs not simply on engineers, but on the interaction between engineers and designers, communicators and storytellers, psychologists, ethicists and historians. Even AI is generating legal, moral, political and cultural questions that no single subject can answer. So when the department of history has only one student, as is the case at a leading university in Nairobi, the country is losing something fundamental.
The purpose of education cannot simply be to supply labour. It must also produce thoughtful citizens capable of navigating uncertainty, complexity and change.
A country that spends the amount of money Kenya does on education owes its citizens something more reliable than hope. The education system ought to expand possibilities rather than narrow them. Because when families sacrifice this much, and taxpayers invest this heavily, education should produce opportunity – not merely another generation of anxious young people navigating an increasingly expensive national lottery.
The writer is a board member of KHRC and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; [email protected] .
