Illegal school fees responsible for high drop-out rates

President Daniel arap Moi said on Friday that charging school children illegal fees was partly responsible for the high dropout rates in Kenya's public schools, the 'Daily Nation' reported. Moi directed the Ministry of Education to carry out a proper audit of school funds to ensure that illegal fees and "other unnecessary levies" were not charged. He called on Education Minister Henry Kosgey to make sure that no primary school pupils were charged fees, and that an "adequate budgetary provision" be made for secondary schools to enable them to make uniform charges. According to Kosgey, primary school enrolment across Kenya had fallen from 100 percent to 87 percent over the last 10 years. In North Eastern Province, enrolment in primary education only reached 26 percent of the school age population, he added.

Meanwhile, the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) last week received a grant of Ksh 3 million (US $39,000) from the International Labour Organization (ILO) to help reduce Kenya's high levels of child labour. The national programme manager of the International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour, Jane Ong'olo, said the partnership between ILO and KNUT had resulted in more than 600 children being taken out of working environments since the launch of the programme last year. The Kenyan government said on 27 September that there were an estimated three to four million child labourers in the country, many of them working under hardship conditions, which negatively affected their health, education and development.

KNUT Secretary-General Francis Ng'anga said the best weapon against child labour was the introduction of free and compulsory basic education. "If the government finds it difficult to make basic education free and mandatory, then it should substantially reduce the cost of education to make it affordable to the majority of Kenyans," he was quoted as saying by the 'Nation'. The government has said it is designing a programme to make primary education free and compulsory throughout Kenya, with implementation of the programme planned for 2003.