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"speaker_name": "Prof. Saitoti",
"speaker_title": "The Minister of State for Provincial Administration and Internal Security",
"speaker": {
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"legal_name": "George Muthengi Kinuthia Saitoti",
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"content": " Mr. Speaker, Sir, it is my very great pleasure to second this Vote on the Ministry of Education. At the very outset, I would like to commend the Minister, Prof. Ongeri, his entire team in the Ministry of Education and the teachers for the very great contribution that they continue to make during a period of unprecedented expansion of education in this country. Mr. Speaker, Sir, education and development are very much intertwined. Indeed, it has been demonstrated all over the world that education is extremely important in terms of ensuring that a country develops. At the same time, education cannot be developed unless there is development. Education is the one that produces the skilled manpower for any nation. It makes the greatest contribution to capital manpower. A country can improve its own standards and the quality of life of its people depending on the quality of the manpower that it has. This is much more the case in the kind of world that we live in today. We are living in global environment. We are living in an extremely competitive world today. Only those countries that have the knowledge and the technological know-how will be able to compete in this very competitive world. The cornerstone of all that is education. It is what really matters. It is, therefore, in recognition of this that this Government decided to provide free education to all primary school-going-age children. It is not only because of that, but also in recognition of the fact that education is a right of every child. For us, we have the Children's Act which makes it clear that children of a school-going-age receive free and compulsory education. Since this very ambitious undertaking was put into place in the beginning of 2003, we have now seen a very high rise in enrolment of students in our primary schools to the extent that today we have about 8 million pupils in our primary schools up from about 5.6 million pupils way back at the beginning of 2003. Mr. Speaker, Sir, an enormous amount of money has been put in place in order to sustain the Free Primary Education (FPE). The Minister for Education has ably informed us that slightly over Kshs106 billion has been set aside for the Ministry of Education. This will bear results in due course. We will become a well-educated country and we will have a skilled manpower. We will all October 7, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 2501 be able to build this nation. That way, we will address the challenges of unemployment and poverty. We should understand that education is an important tool for correcting social inequality. Let me also say that the investment in our own education has not only been confined to the primary education. Indeed, as the enrolment in our primary schools began to expand, it became plainly clear that unless we also put efforts to increase the transition rate from primary school to secondary school, we were going to be faced with a major wastage of students who would have finished primary school education but are unable to proceed to secondary school. That is the rationale behind the offering of Free Secondary Education (FSE). We would have wished to be able to offer FSE and so on. However, internationally, it has been shown that FSE is only confined to the day school secondary education. The number of students has really increased. The same thing applies to the universities. The key thing is about the kind of education that we want to offer our students in this country. It all rests on the four pillars articulated in our Sessional Paper No.1 of 2005. I would like to mention those pillars. One of the fundamental pillars is access to education. This is meant to ensure that all students, irrespective of their social circumstances or physical abilities, are able to proceed to school. Quality is another very important pillar. It has been proven internationally that if you offer education per se and it has no quality, you end up educated people who will not be in a position to utilise that education. Quality of education, from the very beginning, is extremely important. Mr. Speaker, Sir, I am happy to say that the Minister for Education has continued to lay emphasis on the provision of quality education. This is fundamental. I know that they are constrained because we require sufficient teachers in order to offer quality education. As we have heard from the Minister for Education, there is provision in the Budget for the recruitment of additional 6,000 teachers. No doubt, that will cut down slightly the shortage of teachers although the problem still remains. In terms of quality of education, the Minister for Education has explained the efforts his Ministry and the Government is making to ensure that, at least, secondary school students are trained in the area of science which is extremely important. In order to do so, we ought to train teachers in the areas of Science and Mathematics so that they can impart proper and sound knowledge to our students. This is being done. Much more important, and hon. Members might have seen this, is the resources that have been factored in the Budget to ensure that the secondary schools access money to enable them build science laboratories and purchase science equipment. The schools need to have the necessary infrastructure and computers so that students are taught ICT. Mr. Speaker, Sir, the third pillar of our education is equity. This is so because we want to ensure that all kids go to schools. Much more important, we want to ensure that even the children who are physically challenged go to school to have education. That is important and resources have been put in the Budget to ensure that even the physically challenged children access education. This is an important thing in terms of creating equity in education. The fourth pillar is to close the gender gap. For a long time, our education system has been characterised by a very wide gender gap where the girl-child did not have the same opportunities as the boy-child. That is one reason why we embarked on the FPE Programme. We also know that there are several social habits and traditions that tend to marginalise the girl-child. Mr. Speaker, Sir, I am very happy that it has been addressed but much more important is that, we know that there are a number of challenges and I am very happy that the Minister for Education has been able to articulate them. Even as we say we are offering free primary education, we still have almost 1.5 million kids who are not going to school in the arid, poor and hard to reach areas in the slums. We need more teachers. The gender gap has not yet been addressed. 2502 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES October 7, 2008 Mr. Speaker, Sir, I wish to second this very valuable Vote on the Ministry of Education."
}