Kilifi County Executive officer for Education and ICT Prof Gabriel Katana on Thursday said stalled ECD classrooms were under construction and are expected to be completed by September 2018.
Speaking at Kizingo primary school in Chonyi Sub County after an exercise to distribute stationeries for ECD pupils in the region, Prof Katana said construction in 128 stalled classrooms has been revived.
“We had consultations with the budget committee and we agreed that any project that was stalled due to lack of money to be allocated funds and 28 contractors are back to work,” said Prof Katana.
The stationeries which included exercise books, pencils, crayons and instruction books for teachers were distributed in Kidutani, Mitulani, M’buyuni, Mwazang’ombe and Kizingo ECD Centres.
“We want to ensure that we give our children the best foundation in their education by providing the best learning environment which will be supported by the quality of learning materials they use and also qualified teachers. We are committed to change the face of the education department to be better than in the past years,” he said.
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Last month, The Standard established that thousands of children in Kilifi County missed to join ECD due to stalled classrooms which were allocated funds as from 2013-2014 financial years.
By April 2018 only 193 ECD Centres out of 345 centres in the County were complete.
The Education Officer said more than 600 ECD teachers have been employment permanently and another 300 were recently interviewed waiting to be employed.
He said the County aims to employ 1000 teachers this year to ease parents the burden to employ PTA teachers.
Kilifi County ECD Director Angore said the ECD department had budget of shs26 million in the last financial year and same for this year.
He said the County has a total of more than 90,000 pre -primary pupils in Public centres,a number that he said will be constant for sometimes because of the introduction of the new curriculum which has omitted the 0-3 age group.
“Age 0-3 have been removed from the pre-primary group and they are now in daycare centres .We are now concentrating on those with 4 year (pp1) and 5 years (pp2). The stationery distribution exercise is ongoing Countywide.
