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{
    "id": 443444,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/443444/?format=api",
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    "content": "these institutions. There is lack of awareness of what is taking place in some of these institutions. Lastly, some of these institutions have no funding at all, while others have very little money for salaries and so on. Madam Temporary Speaker, if we really want to achieve what we have been singing about – Vision 2030 – and become a middle-income country, we have to put things right. One thing that needs to be put right is research. At every stage of our education system, we must have an inquisitive mind; and an inquisitive mind has to do with research. The best time to introduce research is when the learners are still young; this is the time you can build a culture that can sustain and move Kenya in the future. Madam Temporary Speaker, research has not been given a lot of prominence in our institutions of basic education and it is actually seen as a preserve of institutions of higher learning. That is what we know; it is a preserve of the universities, and so on. Sometimes they even retain it strictly for the post-graduate level, when you go for the second or third degree. But sometimes it is only done in paperwork because they end up not doing much work. Madam Temporary Speaker, if we have to come out, we need to see why we have not developed as a nation; and it is because of the weak research emphasis that we have put in research. We have not put adequate emphasis on research as required. Secondly, we have a big mismatch between the skills that we learn in school and what sometimes is given in the job market as found in the industries. There is a no link between what we are studying and what the consumer requires; the consumer in this case is the industry or the employer. It is for this reason that sometimes we end up getting a lot of students graduating and tarmacking in our counties and in the cities. For example, every day when you wake up in the morning and you are coming to do the business of the Senate, you see many of our youth being utilized as agents selling newspapers instead of going directly to link the skills they learned with the industries. Madam Temporary Speaker, while Vision 2030 calls for technologically driven economy – that is how it is written in the paper – there is a lack of adequate funding to research for any economy to grow. This will make it a very huge task to achieve this vision. It is now four years since Vision 2030 was launched in July, 2008 and everybody was singing about Vision 2030. There was even a Vision 2030 Managing Director (MD) called Mugo Kibati – I do not know who the MD is now – but it just fizzled out recently and we do not know whether people are still singing about it. There is another council called the National Economic and Social Council (NESC), which is trying to push the agenda for research in Kenya. While the industries are the consumers of the graduates that we produce from our educational system in Kenya, there is very little collaboration between the industry and the education sector. In Europe, when you are training human resources, you have to get the support from the industry. Sometimes even the syllabus is also tailor made by the people in the industry. But here in Kenya, we are just working on a syllabus and pumping a lot of knowledge without knowing whether it is linked to the market. Kenya suffers from a very high level of brain-drain. The few researchers and consultants we have disappeared from Kenya The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}