By DAVID ADUDA 

Students in class. Needy students might miss school because of delay in constituting constituency bursary funds.

A policy shift has created delays in the disbursement of the Sh700 million bursary fund allocated to secondary schools this year.

The 3,000 plus secondary schools have not received their allocations as the year comes to an end because the bursaries have to come from the constituencies.

Yet, none of the 210 constituencies has submitted a list of students who should get the money.

Under a new policy that was passed by Parliament a few months ago, bursaries for needy secondary school students will now be processed at the constituency.

Each constituency is required to set up a bursary committee comprising two secondary school headteachers, two representatives of parents, two councillors and a few other interest groups. MPs are automatic members.

The committees will be responsible for receiving applications and vetting the deserving students and, later, forwarding the names to schools.

The committee is required to open a bank account with three signatories, with the area education officer being a mandatory signatory. The police says the bank account number is to be submitted to the ministry headquarters for transfer of money. Each constituency is entitled to Sh1 million.

In total, Sh210 million out of the Sh700 million, will go to the constituencies. The remaining will be retained by the ministry and will be given to districts with the most needy cases, pastoralist areas, girls and the disabled, among other groups.

Our investigations show that none of the constituencies has set up a committee or opened a bank account to which the money can be sent.

In most constituencies, there is intense fighting on who should be in the committees.

The investigations show how MPs are trying to influence the composition of the committees by nominating their supporters, contrary to the guidelines given by the ministry.

Education Minister George Saitoti confirmed that the ministry had not received names of members of any constituency committee, neither has he received any bank account number, where money can be transferred.

"We are concerned that nothing has come from the constituencies, yet we sent out circulars many weeks ago detailing the procedures for their establishment," he said. 

"Most important, we expect that the committees will be representative and will adhere to the guidelines issued for selecting needy students," he added. 

Prof Saitoti explained that the new policy was expected to streamline the process of selecting students and disbursing the funds and ensure that only deserving cases benefited.

In the past, there were many cases where the money was misused, with some headteachers and school committees giving it to undeserving students.

But the chairman of the Kenya Secondary Schools Headteachers Association, Mr Peterson Muthathai, expressed apprehension that the new system was vulnerable to abuse, adding it was likely to lock out many needy children.

"While we appreciate the government's intention to involve more people in selecting students who get bursaries, doing that through the constituency committees may not give the best results," he said.

"Even with clear selection guidelines, political, regional and even religious pressures will come to bear on the committees, leading to a situation where undeserving students will end up getting the bursaries while the needy ones are left out," he added.

He raised three issues with the new policy.
 

• First, he suggests that it should start next year with the incoming Form One students and that those already benefiting be allowed to continue. He argues that due to the logistics involved in selection, some needy students might be left out by the constituency committees.

• Second, the selection criteria is silent on vulnerable groups like children of plantation workers, squatters or urban slum dwellers, who live outside their constituencies.

• Third, the process of selection and communicating the names to schools is likely to take long and will affect quick disbursement of funds. Intended beneficiaries will suffer, with students being sent away for failure to pay school fees and losing critical learning time.

Some headteachers, who did not want to be named, questioned the process of selecting constituency committees, saying it was bound to be influenced by external forces.

Schools, they said, had established vetting systems, which had proved fair and efficient. The students, they explained, filled in forms on admission, detailing their backgrounds and these are countersigned by church ministers.

They added that it was senior education officials who encouraged corrupt practices in the disbursement of funds by granting the money to children from rich families or exerting pressure on headteachers to do so.

"We had cases in the past when we were literally forced by senior ministry officials to give bursaries to students whose parents were financially stable," said one headteacher.

Matters were made worse by the fact that some bursaries are given directly from the ministry headquarters and schools only notified about the recipients.

"This allowed well-connected parents to lobby some officials at the ministry and got bursaries meant for children from poor families," said the headteacher of a national school.

A recent study by the Institute of Policy Analysis and Research entitled Education Financing in Kenya: Secondary School Bursary Scheme Implementation and Challenges, says that in the old system, the bursaries were irregularly allocated to some students and that teachers and parents were never involved in the selection process.

"In most of the schools visited, teachers were unaware of either the existence of the bursary schemes in their schools or how such schemes operated. The task of allocating the bursaries, therefore, rested with the headteacher and the school's accounts clerk or bursar and a few compromised members of the board or parents association," says the report.

Even though experts support decentralisation of bursary disbursement, they caution that only enlightened people, such as accountants and educationists, should be involved in the committees to coordinate the selection process and thereafter account for the money.

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