December is a time of some anxiety for
most parents in Kenya as they try and come up with ways of keeping their
children occupied during a holiday break that is as long as two months
at some schools. But for a select group of parents, there is an even
larger burden of finding a school to place for young children in the
early days after the New Year.
Some may debate the
overall impact and merits of having young children attend kindergarten
as they will be spending the next twenty years of their lives in
educational institutions, but for parents who believe that an early
start is a vital foundation for their kids, they will look for a good
school, and one that is preferably close to where they live.
Some
of the schools in demand, whether real or perceived, have waiting lists
of names of children who are yet to be born but whose parents have paid
deposits.
Sadly, there are not enough schools that
meet this criteria and it is rare to see new nursery schools being
started in the same neighborhoods where these parents live. In fact,
such schools are an endangered species in modern Nairobi
Around
our office area in Kilimani, four well-established schools have
disappeared in the last five years. Two were bought by universities, one
was bought by a church, and only the last one remained as school for
young kids, albeit as a new and lesser-known brand.
EDUCATION IS LUCRATIVE
The
culprit behind this is likely to be real estate. With Nairobi being an
unplanned fast-growing city of new apartments and office complexes built
on land that now sells for between 50 and 300 million shillings an
acre, there is not much room for alternate investments like nursery
school that give lower returns
This is not to say that
schools are a bad investment. Education is actually quite lucrative and
private schools that charge hundreds of thousands of shillings per term
are making billion-shilling investments for new amenities that
international schools are expected to have. Also, Nairobi and other
urban counties have seen this growing gap and have plans to invest in
more primary schools on land, some of which was grabbed. There are also
other parts of rural Kenya that have large and empty high schools that
have been put up by local or government bursary funds. It would be nice
to relocate such schools to where they are in demand, even though there
would still be the problem of finding a piece of land to place such a
school, if such a move was even architecturally possible.
For
now, around Nairobi we will continue to have endless traffic that
starts before dawn as parents drive and school buses transport
pre-school children, some who are still asleep to the few schools they
can find places in.
What are some of the ways to remedy this?
Homeschooling
is one and there are groups of Kilimani who arrange for such sessions
in private homes as a welcome improvement to having young kids stay home
and compete to watch TV with house maids who have different viewing
tastes that are not cartoons.
Another would to persuade
land owners who have abundant land and altruistic motives to invest in
early school education. National and local governments should qualify,
but they don’t have good records of converting their idle land into
schools, even if that is the purpose for which land is allocated.
Another would be to persuade various churches, universities, and
religious institutions that investing in early childhood education will
benefit them in the long term.
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