8 min read. The current Universities Act negates the struggles that led us to the constitution which the Kenyan people promulgated after decades of struggle, blood, sweat and tears. And worse, it reifies the painful legacy of slavery that still haunts Africa and her descendants in the world’s most powerful country.
6 min read. On the second week of January 2019, Form 1 students reported to their various secondary schools. From news reports, a number arrived in high spirits, jovial and excited to be living their dream. But the faces of many more betrayed them – the students seemed tense and glum, their parents deflated and even angry. Many […]
7 min read. The Deputy President’s words will worry Kenyan citizens who have no exit option out of a poorly thought-out turn in education policy. By AKOKO AKECH
12 min read. I was once suspended for inciting a strike. Or at least that is what the letter said. It was the March of my second year in high school; in my first, we had gone on strike twice. The first was a peaceful act of protest that begun at the assembly ground on a cold Monday […]
10 min read. In my last feature, I wrote on the six capacity challenges facing African universities: institutional supply, resources, faculty, research, outputs, and leadership. In this essay, I focus on one critical aspect of the outputs of our universities, namely, the employability of our graduates. To be sure, universities do not exist simply for economic reasons, for return […]
< 1 min read.
10 min read. Over the past two decades African higher education has undergone profound changes. In the 1960s and 1970s, universities on the continent were few in number, small in scale, and elitist institutions with the limited mandate of producing cadres for the Africanization or indigenization of the newly independent state apparatuses. In the 1980s and 1990s, during […]
14 min read. In early 2005, I went to see Geoffrey Griffin, the director of Starehe Boys Centre, just before he died in June of that same year. We discussed many things, among them the 8-4-4 education system. “The fact of the matter is that there is intrinsically nothing wrong with the 8-4-4 system,” Griffin told me then. […]
< 1 min read. The Elephant in conversation with Dr. Wandia Njoya, a blogger and lecturer.
6 min read. In my country Kenya, being a ‘youth’ officially ends on attaining 35 years. Once one gets to this age, you are no longer eligible to benefit from the ‘affirmative action’ policies and laws put in place to ‘uplift’ young people as a disadvantaged demographic. Mid this year (2018), I shall be officially departing from this […]
13 min read. I attended a private high school, Girls’ College, in my teens. It is situated in the leafy suburb of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. We received what was deemed “the best education”, which is to say, distinctly British. We had etiquette lessons in form one, at age thirteen, where we were taught how to talk, how to walk, […]
