Over the years, the country has been facing a challenge of gender disparities in education in Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL).
With roughly 90 per cent of Kenya’s about 2 million children who have never been to school currently living in ASAL regions, a lot still has to be done to enroll them and realize the gender balance in schools.
Basically, children from communities affected by high levels of poverty happen to be those in ASAL regions. They have always had a low chance of being in primary school and transiting to secondary.
While our constitution offers the right to education to be freely enjoyed by each and every child, those from pastoralist communities, especially girls, hardly enjoy this privilege.
The recorded low enrollment and high cases of drop-out among the girls has been contributed to by a number of factors.
First, the common problem of drought in ASAL areas serves as the main reason. Severe drought causes hunger, forcing parents to stop these children from going to school and look for other alternatives to securing food. This originates from misleading cultural stereotypes that women should stay at home and look after family members.
Due to high poverty levels, these girls are forced into early marriages, hence cutting short their academics progress.
Sometimes parents are bribed to ‘sell’ their children to rich old men. This also explains why the country is still facing a challenge of high rates of teenage pregnancies and HIV infections.
Attracting and bringing back these children to school needs a lot of efforts. Considering the poor state of infrastructure and education in the ASAL areas, there’s need to increase allocation of resources to support quality education provision and reforms.
Community involvement is another vital tool. This involves educating community members with the aim of improving their literacy rates particularly for women in rural areas. This helps them to abandon archaic misleading cultural values and practices and later embrace education among girls.
Although free primary education has been in place since 2003 and free day secondary since 2008, a good number of them are still struggling with the current high cost of living. To tackle this, there is need to increase bursary scholarship and allocation for girls in these marginalized regions.
Above all, the government should always come in hand to solve the effects brought about by challenges that ASAL areas face like insecurity and drought.
With the new CBC education reform, the Ministry of Education should come up with ways of identifying long lasting solutions to this complex challenge. We should have both genders equally enrolled and represented in schools in ASAL areas.
Let us involve stakeholders from both the government and NGOs in implementing measures to reduce discrimination between the boys and girls in accessing education while closely working with local communities.
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Stephanie Savatia and Meshack Wafula
Wafula is a Library Social Media Manager, Savatia is a media practitioner, both at Rongo University.
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