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{
    "id": 1505609,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1505609/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 225,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. (Prof.) Kamar",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 33,
        "legal_name": "Margaret Jepkoech Kamar",
        "slug": "margaret-kamar"
    },
    "content": "we did that, we may not need new money. All we need to do is to shrink the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development accordingly. There are personnel who have not been devolved even when agriculture was devolved. The same thing with the Ministry of Health. The Ministry of Health was devolved dominantly, but the personnel we have in Afya House are still intact. We need to ask ourselves, what we devolved and then follow it with the money. If we did that, we may not even require new money. It may just require us to relocate the money to where the function has gone. That is very important because for you to account for any function, you must have the right budget to cover the same function. I really insist to this House that in future, we need to sit and discuss it early, so that we make the money follow the functions. This is a House of oversight and we must make sure that we do what is required of us. I would like to go to the other side again and thank His Excellency the President for the speech that he made on Thursday because it touches also on what we are doing in DORA. In the President’s speech, he allocated money where he emphasized the development of the government. It is very important that we read through, so that we spend according to what we think we are going to fulfil. In his speech, the President touched on university funding. I want to touch on that because I came from there before I joined politics. The current university funding model, if it is understood by all, is a very good model. The model that we have been given is a unit cost model such that the cost of doing law is different from the cost of doing medicine. It is very important that we recognize that For many years, the universities have been given a global fund according to the number of students that they have. When that is done, it is very difficult even for the universities to attract students from outside. Most universities have shied away from attracting students from outside this nation because the fee they charge would be completely different from the fee that we have. If you look at the East African Community (EAC) privileges, it is very clear that students in the East African Community (EAC) partner states are supposed to pay the local fees. Now, in Kenya, if you have a student paying local fees in medicine, you will have a very cheap cost for a very expensive programme. So, they will pay very little and yet the programme is very expensive. It is very important that the right costing is done for university programmes and that is exactly what this model is doing. Once the costing has been done, then the government will give its own scholarships and grants, as well as any support that they would like in terms of scholarships to students. That is a completely different story altogether. It does not mean that if you have the right costing for a programme, you will pay the same. You will not have to pay that if the government is paying for you. That is exactly what this model is doing. What has never been done is to explain this model. It would have been very good to have public participation on the new funding model, so that it is exposed to everybody. I sit in the Committee on Education. As the Committee of Education, we are having problems understanding exactly how the model was, until we got the Cabinet Secretary to come and explain to us. Therefore, with that model, I would like to support the President's approach. I also support so many other things that he gave in his speech. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Director, Hansard and AudioServices, Senate."
}