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{
    "id": 1224072,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1224072/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 221,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. M. Kajwang’",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13162,
        "legal_name": "Moses Otieno Kajwang'",
        "slug": "moses-otieno-kajwang"
    },
    "content": "Fourth Schedule of the Constitution, the commercial colleges we have mushrooming all over are equivalent to village polytechnics. Kiambu County is one counties where in every corner you take, you find a commercial college. You will find a college on hairdressing, driving, business studies and all sorts of issues and any of them offering certificates. Vocational training and education has been defined in this Bill as those institutions that offer certificates and below. Diploma and above have been defined as national institutions that would be regulated by the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Act of 2013. Whenever we are proposing legislation, the question should be what is the problem that we are trying to solve? In this case, the problem is that in 2013, when we started devolution we had the TVET Act and the TVET authority that was established. The assumption was that the TVET authority was going to take care of, regulate, develop curriculum and define quality standards for all vocational training institutions in the country. In the 2010 Constitution and the TVET Act, we forgot that there were institutions assigned to the counties. Since the onset of devolution, village polytechnics and home craft centres have been operating almost in an unregulated fashion because the TVET authority has focused on the bigger institutions, which have bigger budgets and more students. The problem we are trying to solve is that we want to allow county governments to have the regulatory space and the statutory instruments to allow them to take over village polytechnics and home craft centres. I have seen the comments from the Standing Committee on Education, which was looking at this Bill, which also recommended that they should stop being referred to as “village polytechnics” and give them another name so that they can become more attractive to our students. With the TVET authority sitting at the national level, we have seen the polytechnics and home craft centres perhaps do not receive the kind of financing and capitation that is required to take care of the students who are enrolled in those institutions. We have looked at a number of counties and whenever they appear before my committee, many at times you find an audit query on transfers made to polytechnics within those counties. One of the interesting findings is that whenever county governments make allocations to polytechnics there are no modalities and mechanisms to ensure that the money is utilized properly and that returns are brought back to the County Executive Committee Member (CECM) for finance. In terms of capitation, you find that different counties sometimes use different guidelines for support to students. For a number of years, the Senate has approved a conditional grant that was going to village polytechnics. That one area will require a special audit because every year we have been appropriating millions of shillings to go to counties so that they can pass it to village polytechnics, but we have not seen how the money has been utilized. This Bill will ensure that we have a framework for quality standards that have been defined for our polytechnics and homecraft centres in our counties. A student who"
}