The new CBC- A nightmare for northern counties
By; Hirmoge Daud
One year after the promulgation of the new constitution, in 2011, the then Education Minister Prof Sam Ongeri appointed ‘The Task Force for the Realignment of Education Sector to the New Constitution’. The Task Force Produced its report in 2012 and recommended a Competency Based Curriculum.
Out of that report, the government developed Sessional Paper No 2 of 2015, ‘Reforming Education and Training in Kenya’ The sessional paper recommended reforming the Education and Training Sector to provide for development of individual learner’s potential in a holistic and integrated manner while producing intellectually, emotionally and physically balanced citizens.
Basically, the sessional paper recommended the competency based curriculum, establishment of a national learning assessment system, early identification and nurturing of talents, the introduction of national values and national cohesion and their integration into the curriculum and the introduction of three learning pathways at senior school level.
How a whole curriculum reform process was started in 2016 and is already under full implementation from 2018 with needs assessment, public participation, curriculum development and piloting and evaluation and training of teachers and production of curriculum support materials and evaluation of the curriculum support materials, is a miracle that only happens in Kenya.
In a nutshell, the CBC was a well thought out idea but it is now a lost dream. Politics, cartels, a bulldozer government, a president who is interested in superficial legacy instead of real impact, ministers that behave like the Zebra in Animals Farm, political leaders who are more interested in who wins 2022 election than where our children will be in 2022- these are the killers of the CBC dream.
For North Eastern, the CBC is likely to push us deeper into the abyss of marginalization but nobody wants to care.
For Northern Kenya, the CBC portends a new form of marginalization but which can be mitigated if the leaders and those who hold the power and resources, for a moment, think about the future of our children instead of the future elections.
The CBC envisioned a perfect society where everyone is functionally literate and can support their children to learn so that the responsibility of imparting knowledge, skills, values and attitude is shared between the teachers and parents. While that may be a good thing, the parents in Northern Kenya are largely illiterate. Most parents in Northern Kenya do not have even a basic conceptual understanding of the CBC. According to the policy document ‘National Policy for Sustainable Development of Arid and Semi Arid Lands’ published in 2017, only 18.5% of adults in Mandera and 19.1% in Turkana are formally literate compared with the national average of 79% and women are the most disadvantaged. The rest of the ASAL counties are in the same strata. This means, while children in the rest of Kenya may live the CBC dream and vision, children in the North are already marginalized by the same vision.
It is not a secret that one of the biggest shortcomings of the CBC is the poor involvement of teachers in the development and roll out of the new curriculum. Adequate capacity building and coaching has not been done to allow teachers to understand an interpret the CBC. Teachers implement the curriculum and to overlook their role is detrimental to the consumers of the curriculum who are the children. For Northern Kenya, teachers who were already struggling to deliver the old curriculum have a new daunting task to interpret a new curriculum which they don’t even adequately understand. It is noted in the report I quoted above that, ASAL counties have the lowest ratio of trained teachers to pupils. The teacher : pupil ratio in ASAL has always been very unhealthy. Low teacher capacity, motivation and well being have always contributed to very low achievements in education in Northern Kenya. This is another factor of marginalization exacerbated by the CBC.
Finally, schools and tertiary institutions. The limited number of tertiary and institutions of higher learning in Northern Kenya also spells doom. The CBC envisions learning that is skill and competency based, where talents will be identified and nurtured from early stages of learning. Children will be expected to do a certain level of specialization from senior secondary. Needless to say that even the schools infrastructure and capacity cannot support the beautiful ideas espoused in the CBC. With few, ill-equipped and ill-staffed TIVET institutions and only one established University College in the region, there is every reason to be worried about the future.
