The month-long strike by public universities' academic and non-academic staff over a pay dispute may have ended after the government committed Sh20 billion for salary increases, but the deeper crises confronting Kenya’s higher education remain unresolved.
The biggest challenge is not staff pay – it is governance, policy and legal frameworks and funding. However, successive governments have papered over these issues, opting for short-term fixes rather than long-term and meaningful interventions, giving room for the problems to pile up.
At the core is governance of higher education that shifts at every twist and turn. On paper, universities have autonomy to govern their affairs - manage resources, recruit staff, deliver academic and research programmes - but in practice they are micro-managed by the national government. Policies, funding, student admissions, growth and expansion plans are all drawn up by the national government.
In 2012, Parliament passed the Universities Act, bringing all universities and private universities, as well as all other higher education agencies, under a single law to harmonise and ensure coordinated governance, with emphasis on autonomy.
However, several amendments were subsequently brought that reversed several gains, clawing back institutional autonomy and reverting some powers back to the central government. One notable reversal was taking away the university’s councils’ power of recruiting vice-chancellors and deputy vice-chancellors and bestowing that on the Public Service Commission (PSC).
The reason why the law previously mandated university councils to recruit senior managers was to safeguard institutional autonomy and in turn, empower university managers to make decisions independently. Thus, transferring tasks such as competitive recruitment of senior university managers to PSC weakens this autonomy. It also raises questions about the constitutional principle of dispersal of powers, which was meant to strengthen institutions, including universities, enabling them to take charge of their affairs.
Indeed, the strike exposed the diminished role of university managers, as the joint committee of vice-chancellors could not make any decision and had to consistently defer to the government, prolonging the stalemate.
Related to this is policy incoherence resulting in ad hoc and arbitrary directives, which undermine planning, administration and the growth of university education. Examples abound.
For one, university education has suffered a funding crisis due to policy inconsistencies. Between 2017 and 2026, higher education recorded three policy reversals with profound impact on financing. In 2017-18, the government of retired President Uhuru Kenyatta introduced a new funding model – differentiated unit cost (DUC) – that replaced an earlier framework that provided uniform funding for all students.
From left: Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU) National Chairperson Dr Grace Nyongesa, Secretary-General Dr Constantine Wasonga and National Trustee Jane Michael raise their fists in solidarity during a press briefing at the union headquarters in Nairobi on September 24, 2026.
Photo credit: Boniface Bogita | Nation Media Group
Under the DUC, each university was to be funded on the basis of the actual cost of delivering the specific programmes. Subsequently, academic programmes were clustered into 14 distinct disciplines, and those requiring higher expenditures, such as medicine, pharmacy and architecture, were allocated more funds compared to humanities.
Five years later, when President William Ruto ascended to power, he reversed the DUC policy and introduced a student-centred model whose central focus was on means testing to determine learners’ capability or lack thereof to pay fees. But the policy was quickly thrown out just after three years because it proved impractical and untenable. Currently, the government is pushing for a new model - universal 100 per cent student loan and market driven – through the yet to be finalised Tertiary Education, Placement and Funding Bill.
The consequence is that the policy reversals and inconsistencies have created uncertainties, paralysing the public universities as they are unable to plan and effectively deliver quality education and research.
Expansion of universities
The second example relates to development and expansion of universities. In law, the Universities Act assigns the Commission for University Education (CUE) the responsibility of regulating the establishment and expansion of universities. However, political considerations often take precedence over regulatory frameworks and strategic planning of university education.
For example, in the past two years, the current administration has established five new universities - Bomet, Nyandarua, Makueni, Kabarnet and Kerio Valley – even when there was no indication of need.
The country has 36 fully-fledged public universities, five specialised universities and seven constituent colleges. In addition, there are 32 fully-fledged private universities, two constituent colleges and seven universities operating with letters of interim authority. The question is, does the country really need all these universities? What is the justification for establishing the new universities?
Members of the Universities Academic Staff Union, led by Uasu Secretary General Constantine Wesonga (centre), protest in Nairobi on October 15, 2026.
Photo credit: Evans Habil | Nation Media Group
The problem with the unplanned expansion of public universities is that it causes a strain on government funding. Considering that the country does not have a large pool of academics to serve all those universities, nor does it have resources to pay expatriate lecturers or support the new universities, the unplanned expansion only deepens the crisis in higher education.
Crucially, the expansion presents a striking paradox. Consistently, the government has been unable to provide sufficient funding to the universities, pushing them to huge debts. In the current financial year, the government allocated Sh163.9 billion to higher education against their requirement of Sh311.9 billion, creating a funding gap of Sh148 billion, deepening their financial woes.
At present, the public universities have an accumulated debt portfolio of about Sh100 billion. Some of them, such as Moi University, had to close satellite campuses, cut academic programmes, merge departments and rationalise staffing to reduce the financial haemorrhage. Thus, the question is, why should the government continue establishing new universities when it cannot finance existing ones?
At any rate, the new universities are not designed to introduce any new or unique academic programme - they all offer common courses such as Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Education and Bachelor of Commerce - thus they are not a novelty. Yet, graduates of most of the courses, like education, arts and social sciences, take too long to get employment after graduation, highlighting the folly of creating new universities that only duplicate programmes whose graduates have saturated the market.
Beyond these concerns, the prevailing financial and structural challenges have rendered the public universities unable to run their programmes on schedule, resulting in low students’ completion rates, itself a key indicator for institutional success.
A review of the universities’ academic schedules in the past few years is telling. Since 2024, public universities staff have gone on strike every year over pay disputes, paralysing learning and all other academic programmes. Cumulatively, the universities lost more than 100 teaching days during the period, equivalent to one full academic semester of 14-15 weeks. Such losses derail students’ progression from admission to completion, with some falling off and those reaching the finish line doing so after many years.
In a new publication entitled, Higher Education Global Trends Report, Unesco observes that success in higher education is not measured just by increased student enrollment, but also through the effectiveness, equity and efficiency of the systems, which ultimately leads to high completion rates, successful graduation and meaningful learning outcomes.
This is a wake-up call for Kenya. Persistent lecturers’ strikes have placed the country at a crossroads, severely compromising its push toward internalising higher education, which has increasingly become a strategy for building financial self-sufficiency outside government funding and establishing a mark for academic excellence. Therefore, university administrators and the government must establish a sustainable framework to eliminate strikes by both staff and students to ensure the stability and predictability of academic programmes.
In the final analysis, the government must confront the critical question of how it plans to organise and revitalise higher education to effectively contribute to national development. A higher education system known more for recurrent strikes, learning paralysis, delayed academic programmes, resource scarcity, and research paucity cannot deliver the long-term development agenda, nor can it guarantee economic sustainability and resilience.
If Kenya is to achieve long-term economic growth, the government must shift away from reactionary crisis management, policy inconsistencies and stop-gap financing mechanisms. Establishing a competitive higher education system requires sustainable funding, robust infrastructure investment, and support for academic research.
