Prof. Margaret Kamar

All parliamentary appearances

Entries 1211 to 1220 of 3046.

• 21 Aug 2012 in National Assembly: Mr. Speaker, Sir, may I first apologize because this answer was supposed to be given last week. I apologize because I was expecting an ambassador in my office. I did not know in time that the Assistant Minister who was supposed to be here was taken ill. The other one was away. So, I really apologize that we were not in the House. Secondly, this answer was already here by that time. It was brought to the Office of the Clerk on 7th August. So, I am surprised that it is not here. That is because I checked and it ... view
• 21 Aug 2012 in National Assembly: Mr. Speaker, Sir, yes, there was a delivery book. view
• 21 Aug 2012 in National Assembly: Mr. Speaker, Sir, if the hon. Member will allow me to continue, I will proceed. view
• 21 Aug 2012 in National Assembly: Mr. Speaker, Sir, I beg to reply. (a) The recent ranking of universities was done by two different bodies. The first one was done by a body called the Fourth International Colleges and Universities which was done early in 2012, and which gave results of 100 universities and colleges. In that ranking, only four public universities and one private university in Kenya appeared in the top 100. In another ranking which was done by Cybermetric Lab under the auspices of the Ranking Web of the World Universities which was done in January 2012, there were five public universities in Kenya ... view
• 21 Aug 2012 in National Assembly: Mr. Speaker, Sir, we are not allowing the establishment of universities in market places and everywhere. We have one law that is used to establish universities currently. The establishment of a university or university college goes through the law. The universities, however, can establish campuses for themselves. The problem with the current law, which we are hoping will be repealed in the next few weeks, is the fact that the autonomy in campuses does not allow you to re-penetrate and check. The laws that are about to come to this House are going to reform that bit of the law ... view
• 21 Aug 2012 in National Assembly: Mr. Speaker, Sir, on the issue of the ranking, I said that we even have universities that do not appear in one ranking and appear in another one. That tells you that the bodies that are ranking have different criteria and that is why they cannot be uniform. The hon. Member has talked of one being ranked a step behind the other. That is not true because some do not even appear in the ranking of others. You could have Egerton at 50 in one ranking and 99 in the other ranking. So, it tells you that the discrepancy is ... view
• 21 Aug 2012 in National Assembly: Mr. Speaker, Sir, I was just responding to how she put her question. Otherwise, I would like to agree that we would like to be in the top ten. We are really working on how we can be in the top ten. I want to say this because we will be coming back to this House, to even request for that kind of expansion. I did mention the fact that we are really addressing the issue of staffing in universities. It is very urgent and I did admit at the beginning that the--- view
• 21 Aug 2012 in National Assembly: Mr. Speaker, Sir, I have talked about what the new law, which is a creation of this House, is doing. The old law did not envisage, in fact, inspecting public universities. If you look at the Commission for Higher Education, it was directing its efforts to inspecting private universities, actually creating charters for the same and issuing authority to operate. But over time, it has been realized that the public universities must be addressed in the same manner that the private universities have been done. So, the new law that is coming will be the only way that the Ministry ... view
• 21 Aug 2012 in National Assembly: Mr. Speaker, Sir, I am not worried about the way we are going to do the balancing. As the hon. Members are aware, we are talking of increasing the number of staff in the universities. I have already said that even holders of the Doctor of Philosophy Degree (PhDs) are less. So, what we have discussed with the universities and agreed before the Kibunjia Commission is the fact that additional members of staff must deliberately look for ethnic groups that are not dominant in the universities currently. This is because of the rapid expansion that we are going to see ... view
• 21 Aug 2012 in National Assembly: Mr. Speaker, Sir, it is true that we are actually pushing to be among the top ten. I have said that with regard to the staffing issue, we are addressing that through various agreements and negotiations with other partners to ensure that we do proper capacity building for the universities. On the other side, we are working on the connectivity of all universities. In fact, all our middle level colleges are going to be connected very soon. We are also demanding from the universities that we must see them on the website so that we can gauge the most updated. ... view