By SAMUEL SIRINGI 

Children at a school in Kisumu District: "Some schools are already recording fresh dropouts as parents fail to provide their children with the reading and writing materials."

Seven-year-old Abdalla Managa may be young but the torture she has undergone as she looks for a classroom to sit in will linger in her mind for ever.

For the entire third term, her father, Mr Henry Managa, has failed to enrol her in a Nairobi school. Reason? He had bought all the required uniforms but socks and pullover. The head teacher insisted that Mr Managa had to buy the "full uniform" before being admitted.

Yet her peers enrolled when the free and compulsory primary education programme began in January have counted 10 months of learning.

Abdalla's case may seem isolated but it exemplifies some of the problems that children and their parents face as the teething problems of the new formula of learning unravels.

Despite the programme putting back to class about 2 million children Ð the number rose from 5.9 million to 7.2 million Ð myriad challenges remain. 

Parents do not seem to understand what constitutes "free education", expansion of schools and construction of extra classrooms is at a standstill and the number of teachers is barely adequate to handle the extra pupils.

So far the Government has pumped in Sh8.7 billion from the exchequer and donors but the funds have not quenched the learning and teaching needs of of the schools.

The funds fall short of the individual budgets for primary schools in the country and the programme would be difficult to sustain should donors pull out.

According to the Government, normal children (as opposed to children with special needs) are allocated a maximum of Sh1,020 a year for teaching and learning materials. Each school is also allocated Sh25,000 for storage facilities.

Some schools are also faced with a problem of channelling the funds to their accounts. Latest reports indicate that several schools are yet to receive their allocations. Some of the affected schools are in Kisumu, Marsabit and Bungoma districts. 

What it means is that the schools have not been able to adequately meet the costs of learning and reading materials. No wonder some schools are already recording fresh dropouts as parents fail to provide their children with the reading and writing materials.

Last week, the Nyanza provincial Director of Education, Mr David Siele, said more than 10 per cent of the pupils who enrolled in primary schools under the programme in January have dropped out.

The province had recorded an increase of 300,000 pupils in January.

In Nyando District, many parents still detained their children at home for child labour on sugar cane farms according to the District Commissioner, Mr Hassan Farah.

Some parents feel that the Government should have offered school uniforms, tea break snacks and even completed some buildings under construction in some schools.

Education Minister George Saitoti has given parents and teachers a leeway to decide on what projects they should pursue so long as no child is sent home for lack of fees or materials.

Misappropriation of funds by head teachers has also been cited as a challenge to the programme. Some teachers were said to be deliberately refusing to buy required materials. Others were accused of diverting the funds to unintended purposes.

Prof Saitoti says monitoring teams have been sent out to schools but critics argue the teams are incapable of inspecting all the country's schools and establish the money that was misappropriated.

Education Permanent Secretary Prof Karega Mutahi says so far 34 teachers have been interdicted over the cases of misappropriation.

And their employer, the Teachers Service Commission secretary James Ongwae said the commission had found the teachers guilty of misappropriating school funds.

"The Government will not tolerate any form of plunder of public funds. Head teachers must put the funds to the right use or they lose their jobs," he said.

Although the head teachers are required to display lists of expenditure on notice boards, few parents insist on that, perhaps, because of the ignorance that exists especially in rural schools.

"They (lists) should be made available for scrutiny by parents and they should show amount of money received and how they were spent," says Prof Mutahi.

Some school heads also connive with school committees to divert the funds to unintended purposes. 

Recently, Mt Elgon District Officer Maurice Agola gave local primary school head teachers up to October 15 to deliver instruction materials to their pupils or face the sack.

He had visited several schools and found there were no teaching materials despite funds being sent to them for that purpose. It appears that some head teachers were colluding with suppliers to deliver only half the materials paid for.

It is instructive that members of school committees have been trained on accounting procedures to enable them put to proper use the free education funds.

The Government has given an advantage to arid and semi-arid areas where boarding schools have been benefiting from a deliberate double allocation of free education funds for each pupil to help them keep the children in school. Mission schools, too, got additional funding of Sh100,000 under the arrangement.

But teachers have a different idea on the free education programme. Although the Kenya National Union of Teachers welcomed the idea, it says it caused a big shortage of teachers due to the high enrolment.

Knut secretary-general Francis Ng'ang'a says the government needs to employ 60,000 teachers to support the programme.

Currently, he says, the quality of education standards is at stake following the increased enrolment in primary schools.

The Government recently completed a teacher recruitment programme which added 6,500 teachers to the payroll. But Mr Ng'ang'a argues that was merely a replacement of the teachers who had left the service through natural attrition.

Already, Prof Saitoti has hinted that the Government would employ more teachers by the end of the year to improve the quality of learning.

In Nairobi, however, the programme has been marked by mixed fortunes. Provincial Commissioner Francis Sigei says although the programme has brought 50,000 new pupils, there were still many more in city suburbs.

According to the city's Provincial Director of Education, Mr Daniel Sang, the Government has allocated an extra Sh1.9 million to pupils in special schools in the city under the free education programme.

But it will take some time for the Government to know the real state of the programme. A monitoring and evaluation exercise of the programme is on countrywide.

Another challenge facing the programme is that teachers are not well prepared to cope with increased enrolment. 

Recently, Prof Mutahi asked the 21 teacher training colleges nation-wide to start equipping their learners with skills on emerging issues, including increased enrolment.

This was quickly implemented by some of the colleges. According to Highridge Teachers Training College chief principal, Mrs Margaret Ojuando, the college has started teaching trainees how to cope with large classes.

A formula of teaching, called "multi-grade shift teaching and multi-age groups teaching," is one of the courses introduced to the P1 trainees, according to Mrs Ojuando.

In the system, teachers are able to classify learners according to either their level of understanding or ages to make the pupils more responsive.

"Our aim is to ensure that our graduates are relevant to the market and that they are not shocked by these situations when they are posted to schools," says Mrs Ojuando.

The quality of school committees which are supposed to manage the funds is also largely to blame as many of them comprise illiterate members, especially in the rural areas. Thus even if the Government had trained many of them on accounting techniques, it will be difficult for them to adequately grasp accounting procedures.

On Friday, the Government Ð perhaps in a resolve to address the shortcomings in the free education programme Ð opened a hotline telephone number through which problems will be channeled to the Education Ministry.

It would also be pertinent for the Government to devise ways of making the education compulsory in line with the Children's Act. Otherwise the effort to ensure education for all by the year 2015 will still remain a pipe dream as more challenges derail the free education programme.

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