Why Kenya's education reforms are struggling to deliver

Kenya’s education reforms face persistent challenges, from teacher shortages and inadequate facilities to widening inequalities in learning outcomes. [Courtesy]

Nearly a decade after Kenya began shifting its education system from an examination-driven model to one centred on competencies, the country is facing an uncomfortable reality: getting children into school has proved considerably easier than ensuring that they are actually learning.

That challenge took centre stage in Nairobi on Tuesday this week as education ministers, policymakers, teachers, researchers and development partners from across East Africa gathered for the Second East African Community Regional Education Conference. The meeting sought answers to a question that increasingly extends beyond curriculum design to whether ambitious education reforms can be translated into measurable improvements in what children learn and can do.

President William Ruto, who was expected to attend the conference, did not appear in person, with Cabinet Secretary for East African Community, ASALs and Regional Development Beatrice Askul Moe, the conference’s Chief Guest, delivering his speech on his behalf.

Addressing nearly 600 delegates, Ruto argued that education systems should ultimately be judged not by the policies they produce or the money they spend, but by what learners can learn, understand and apply.

“Education policy must be judged not by the elegance of our policy documents, but by what a learner can know, do and access,” Ruto said.

The message came against the backdrop of fresh evidence showing that thousands of Kenyan children are moving through the education system without mastering basic skills. A new Status of Junior School Education Report by Usawa Agenda found that 29 per cent of Grade 9 learners lack both foundational literacy and numeracy competencies, while the proportion rises to 41 per cent among Grade 7 learners.

The findings expose a difficult contradiction at the heart of Kenya’s education transformation, which has invested heavily in expanding access, redesigning the curriculum and preparing learners for a changing economy, even as many schools continue to grapple with teacher shortages, inadequate laboratories and libraries, limited learning materials and stark disparities between well-resourced and poorly equipped institutions.

For the architects of the competency-based system, the ambition is to produce learners who can think critically, solve problems and apply knowledge rather than simply pass examinations, but nearly a decade into the transition, the most basic question remains whether children are learning enough to make that transformation work.

It is a question that places Kenya’s education reforms under an increasingly unforgiving spotlight, while also making the Nairobi conference’s theme of “Transforming Education in East Africa: From Commitments to Impact, Fostering Resilient and Future-Ready Systems for Sustainable Development” particularly significant.

The conference confronted the widening gap between education commitments and classroom outcomes. For Kenya, the warning could hardly have come at a more difficult moment.

Kenya has made considerable progress in getting more children into classrooms, but the harder task has been ensuring that they leave those classrooms having acquired the foundational skills they need to progress through the education system and participate meaningfully in society.

The Usawa Agenda assessment provides a sobering picture of that challenge. It shows that although the situation improves as learners progress through junior school, nearly three in 10 still reach Grade 9 without mastering the basic skills expected of them.

The problem is particularly severe in rural and public schools, with the report, which covered all 47 counties and involved more than 49,000 learners, showing that government policies have succeeded in getting children into classrooms without necessarily ensuring that those classrooms are equally capable of delivering meaningful learning.

Hellen Avisa, Director at the Ministry of Education’s Directorate of Junior School, speaking at the conference, said the evidence should compel policymakers to move beyond collecting data and towards acting on what the data reveals.

“When we have evidence, what next? We need to act, so evidence must inform action,” she said.

That may be the central challenge facing Kenya’s education reforms: the country does not necessarily lack ideas, policies or ambitious plans, but it has struggled to translate them consistently into results in every classroom.

The Competency-Based Education system was introduced with a fundamentally different ambition from the examination-driven model it replaced, seeking to move education away from an overwhelming emphasis on memorisation and towards competencies, creativity, problem-solving, practical skills and the ability to apply knowledge.

On paper, few would dispute those objectives, but delivering them requires considerably more from schools and teachers than the previous system demanded.

Education experts argue that a competency-based system depends on adequately trained teachers, manageable class sizes, specialised facilities, learning materials, laboratories, workshops and technology, while also requiring parents and communities to understand what the new approach is designed to achieve.

That is where implementation is running into the realities of the classroom.

Only 27.5 per cent of junior schools nationally have functional science laboratories, while just 27 per cent have libraries, with about a third having adequate learning materials and fewer than half having computers available for learners. Private and urban schools are generally better equipped than public and rural institutions.

The regional disparities are even more striking, with the proportion of junior schools reported to have functional science laboratories standing at 98.7 per cent in Nairobi, compared with just 13.8 per cent in Western and 15.4 per cent in North Eastern.

The disparities raise a fundamental question about how the same competency-based curriculum can deliver comparable outcomes for children learning in radically different environments.

Education expert David Kipruto argued that the problem is not necessarily the philosophy behind CBE but the manner in which it has been implemented, saying the reform was introduced before many schools had adequate infrastructure, teacher preparation and public awareness.

Claudia Lagat, assistant programme officer at Usawa Agenda, similarly highlighted that the challenge lies in planning, utilisation of resources, political goodwill and ownership of the reform. In other words, Kenya may not have an education policy crisis as much as it has an implementation crisis.

Teachers are being asked to deliver more with less

No education reform can succeed without teachers, making the conditions under which educators are expected to implement the competency-based system central to whether the reform can deliver on its promise.

Ruto’s speech acknowledged this tension, arguing that technological advances should not obscure the central role of teachers.

“Technology will change education; AI will transform access to knowledge. But none of this diminishes the teacher. Technology can carry information. A teacher builds a human being,” he said.

Yet the teachers expected to drive the transformation continue to face shortages, heavy workloads and concerns over pay and career progression, creating a difficult environment in which educators are expected to nurture creativity, critical thinking, practical skills and individual talents while working within a system that remains constrained by limited resources.

The Teachers Service Commission has identified a teacher shortage of about 116,000 and has sought additional funding to recruit 16,000 intern teachers as part of efforts to address staffing gaps in junior and senior schools.

The problem becomes even more significant as the competency-based system expands into areas requiring specialised teaching, with STEM subjects alone facing substantial staffing gaps and some subjects introduced or expanded under the new curriculum requiring skills that many schools do not yet have in sufficient numbers.

At the same time, thousands of teachers remain on internship terms, with the Sh17,000 monthly pay for junior secondary school interns becoming a particular source of discontent as teachers and their unions argue that the remuneration does not adequately reflect the demands placed upon them.

This has continued to create a contradiction at the centre of the reform: the system expects teachers to cultivate creativity, critical thinking, practical skills and individual talents, yet many are working in overcrowded classrooms, understaffed schools and poorly resourced environments.

From the conference deliberations, the question, therefore, was not simply whether teachers are committed to the reform, but whether the system was giving them a realistic chance of making it work.

More money – but better results?

The Government points to a significant increase in education funding, with the sector allocated Sh784.5 billion in the 2026/27 financial year, up from about Sh702.7 billion in the previous financial year. The allocation includes Sh424.3 billion for the Teachers Service Commission, Sh136.6 billion for basic education, Sh163.9 billion for higher education and Sh58.5 billion for TVET.

On the face of it, the increased allocation represents a substantial financial commitment, but the central question remains whether additional spending is translating into better learning outcomes.

Principal Secretary for Higher Education and Research Beatrice Inyangala told the conference that higher allocations must be accompanied by stronger monitoring of expenditure and evidence that increased investment is producing better outcomes.

That argument goes directly to the heart of President Ruto’s remarks. “Every shilling committed to education must answer one question: what difference did it make to the learner?” he said.

A question that should be applied to every major education programme because, while the number of classrooms built, the resources allocated to teacher recruitment and the number of devices distributed are important measures of investment, they are ultimately only inputs into a much larger process.

The more consequential questions emerging from the conference were whether a child can read and perform basic mathematics, think critically and solve problems, and apply what they have learned beyond the classroom.

The inequality hiding inside the reform

The learning crisis, and the inequality it exposes, was a central concern at the conference. Participants noted that a child in a well-equipped urban private school does not enter the competency-based system with the same opportunities as a child attending a poorly resourced rural public school.

Yet both learners are expected to navigate the same curriculum and eventually compete for many of the same opportunities, creating a disparity that risks turning an education reform intended to broaden opportunity into one that instead reinforces existing inequalities.

The Usawa Agenda findings exposed this problem, showing that public and rural schools generally perform worse and have fewer learning resources than private and urban institutions.

Climate change adds another layer of vulnerability, with UNICEF warning that climate shocks disrupted the education of millions of children across Eastern and Southern Africa between 2005 and 2024, highlighting the need for education systems capable of withstanding droughts, floods, displacement and other disruptions.

For East Africa, therefore, the challenge extends beyond curriculum reform to the broader task of building education systems that are equitable, resilient and capable of delivering learning even when communities face economic, environmental and social shocks.