[إيليا]

Schools in Kenya.

As one of the many different developing countries in Eastern Africa, Kenya is unique in its own way. With its mangrove swamps, thick forests, crystal lakes, towering mountains, and vast deserts; this is all wrapped up in a country the size of Texas. It attracts millions of visitors in seek for an African Safari which is much appreciated by the government as a source of foreign capitol for this poor region. In this essay I will demonstrate the description of schools in both Kibera and Nairobi and comparison between public and private schools and the facilities in Kenya.

First, Kibera is the largest slum in all Africa. Kibera has anywhere from 500,000 to 800,000 crowded people, smaller than Manhattan’s Central Park. Mud-walled, corrugated iron-roofed settlements. There are 76 private elementary and high schools, enrolling more than 12,000 students. The schools are typically run by local entrepreneurs, a third of who are women who have seen the possibility of making a living from running a school. Again, many of the schools offered free places to the poorest, including orphans.

Second, in the slums of Nairobi, private schools are made from the same materials as every other building: corrugated iron sheets or mud walls, with windows and doors cut out to allow light to enter. Floors are usually mud, roofs sometimes thatched. Children will not be in uniform and will usually be sitting on homemade wooden benches. In the dry season, the wind will blow dust through the cracks in the walls; in the rainy season, the playground will become a pond, and the classroom floors mud baths.






Third, comparison between public school and private school. In Kenya, where free elementary education had just been introduced to much acclaim. How would this affect private schools for the poor, should they exist? In Kenya, where the raw test scores showed students in private and public schools performing at similar levels, the fact that private schools served a far more disadvantaged population resulted in a gap of 0.1 standard in English and 0.2 standard in math The adjusted differences between the performance of public and private sectors in each setting were highly statistically significant.

In conclusion,though elite private schools do exist in impoverished regions of the world, private schools are not only for the privileged classes. From a wide range of settings to the urban periphery areas, private education is serving huge numbers of children. Indeed, in those areas where we were able to adequately compare public and private provision, a large majority of schoolchildren are in private school, a significant number of them in unrecognized schools and not on the state’s radar at all. Above all, the evidence should inspire those who are working for school choice in the world: stories of parents overcoming all the odds to ensure the best for the children in Kenya, stories of education entrepreneurs’ creating schools out of nothing, in the middle of nowhere. The question still remains, why can not we help them by drawing a smile into their innocent faces, and give them hope and future?