More pain for Kenyan parents as Ministry of Education raises school fees
Kenyans will be forced to dig deep into their pockets to cater for their daily lives as well as pay raised school fees.
This after the government, through the Ministry of Education, issued new fee guidelines for 2023, ending the subsidized fee programme that introduced during the 2021 school calendar.
The new guideline will be implemented next year during the new education calendar.
Parents of learners enrolled in all national and extra-county schools in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Kisumu, Nyeri, Thika and Eldoret will now pay a total of Sh53,554 per year up from Sh45,000 they have been paying since 2021, according to guidelines issued by Dr. Julius Jwan, the departing Principal Secretary of the State Department for Early Learning and Basic Education, on November 15, 2022.
Rather than paying the current Sh35,000 annually, parents whose children attend boarding and extra-county schools in other regions will now pay Sh40,535.
Even so, the government will subsidize each student attending a boarding school with the same amount of money (Sh22,244) as it does each student attending a day school.
This will cover tuition (teaching, learning resources, and exams), for which the government has allotted Sh4,144; medical/insurance costs (Sh 2,000); activities (Sh1,500); and the Sh200 allocated for Strengthening of Mathematics and Science in Secondary Education (SMASSE).
This new guideline comes at a time when more than 5.1 million Kenyans are unable to put a meal on the table. Prices of commodities such as sugar, milk, unga and cooking oil are very high. Kenyan inflation stands at 8.5 per cent.