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    "id": 571944,
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    "content": "meaningful and grow, they will require larger pieces of land than what is being provided at the moment. That is why I suggest that careful thought is given in establishing universities so that even those that have been established on 50 hectares of land will have room to expand. We know of universities that occupy as large as 200 hectares or, 300 to 800 hectares of land or even bigger. Some cities in the world are university cities because they entirely occupy the city. We should have that consideration in our country for that. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, in my county, we have been fortunate because we have negotiated with the Commission for University Education (CUE) to establish a university in Bomet County. We have carefully thought about it and we have avoided the serious mistake which we have made of converting middle level colleges to universities. We have established a university on a new ground. We will put up new structures for the university to preserve the middle level colleges that we have in the country. We are aware that this country is not progressing as it should because of lack of middle level personnel who are the technical people who would drive and build the economy of this country. We should be careful and all counties should look at these aspects and preserve the middle level colleges that are existing. There is also the question of relevance of the courses; this country is known for producing graduates. This year, we are going to produce about 58,000 graduates. It is so important for the economy of this country that we produce relevant qualifications on our population or graduates. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, many times we produce individuals that are seeking to be employed. It is important that we start to produce individuals that are deployable and that are ready to be deployed. This is very important in the way we choose the courses that we have. I am very happy that the CUE is coming in to not only look at the quality of the courses being offered but also the relevance of each of courses that are being offered. It is very important for the relevance of the courses to be aligned to the natural resources that we are continuing to establish, so that courses like mineralogy, hydrology, marine studies and petroleum industry studies, which are new and relevant courses and are the kind of courses which should be established. We want to use our universities for what they are for. They are areas of research where we establish new knowledge that can be utilized in the short term or in the long term. It is very important for the CUE to help the existing universities and the new university to increase the depth of knowledge that is established in the universities by improving on funding research. In this country, we spend less than 1 per cent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on research. This is a very insignificant figure considering how much we would establish in doing research and how much we could know by doing research. For example, there is the big question of food security in our country and in most of our neighbouring African countries. We can improve on areas of food security by research and have new sources of food. We know that traditional foods are very rich, unexplored and are within our reach. We would like to have research done at the university level to establish new sources of food that we could use in our countries, and universities are the ones to do this. 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."
}