A few years ago, Mandera county hit the headlines when the country woke up to reports of a bus attack that left several people dead, majority of whom were teachers.
This led to uproar among teachers who demanded that those in Northern Kenya and other insecurity prone areas either be provided with adequate security or transferred to other regions.
What followed was a sustained push by a section of the teachers working in insecurity prone areas to seek transfer and at one point, they pitched camp at the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) headquarters demanding action.
The teachers insisted that they were soft targets for being ‘non-locals’ or what is now referred as the ‘seventh tribe’ and demanded transfer to other regions.
But even with the insecurity aspect at play, Mandera leaders say the situation was worsened by instances where some non-local teachers accept to report to the county only as an avenue of acquiring a posting elsewhere.
Amidst these challenges, the county was hit by a huge teacher shortage and needed a solution, especially with the return of calmness.
And today stands a Teachers Training College (TTC) that will come in handy in addressing the teachers shortage in the county, with 697 trainees now in their second year of study.
Mandera Governor, Mohamed Khalif said that they had to find a way to fill the gap, since the region has had a serious shortage of primary school teachers and the deficit was growing every year.
“We opened the first teacher's training college here, which was built by the Mandera county government,” said the governor.
The county also seeks to support college students to pay 50 per cent of their school fees while the parents pay the remainder, with the Khalif determined to ensure the programme’s sustainability.
The governor formed a task force when he took office in 2022 to understand and develop a roadmap to transform the devolved education function, which issued its report last year with far reaching recommendations.
Besides dealing with the teacher shortage, the county boasts of a tailor made programme, dubbed Elimu kwa Wote, which caters for school fees of learners in all levels.
The initiative launched in January last year, has now used about Sh800 million.
In the first year, for instance, the county used Sh350 million to pay fees for secondary school learners while another Sh460 million was used in the 2023/24 financial year.
The county is providing full tuition cost for boarding and day secondary schools, a decision which aligns with the governor’s manifest to provide free secondary education to all students enrolled.
“The idea was out of a report released just after General Election, which indicated that 60 per cent of school going children, especially from Arid and Semi-Arid Lands, including Mandera were out of school,” Khalif noted.
During that time, he said the county was also hit by drought and livestock for the largely pastoralist community in Mandera died, yet it is their main economic activity.
Due to the situation, he said schools could not open because a majority of parents could not affort to put food on the table so raising fees would be a toll order - a challenged that birthed 'Elimu kwa Wote' initiative.
In December 2022, a meeting between the governor and principals in the county established that 60 per cent of the term is lost because children are sent home for school fees.
“The effect of this initiative was instant. Many people came back to school. Girls who had dropped out and many others came back to school. The admission doubled and we achieved 100 per cent from primary to secondary,” explained Khalif.
“People have realised that it is important to go to school and have embraced this initiative. The number of enrollment in all schools, both boarding and day increased significantly and though it the resources are a challenge, I made a commitment to keep the initiative going,” he added.
Here, the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) bursaries support needy students who go to school outside the county.
Part of the challenges the county experiences is on data, with Khalif saying they do not have full control of secondary school and have to keep verifying to know whether there are instances of transfer or other issues affecting number of students.
In addition to the fees initiative, the county also has a feeding programme to ensure students from poor background remain in school all year round.
Khalif said all the initiatives the county is implementing are geared towards creating a sustainable education pathway, with parents lauding the programmes because they no longer have to sell their livestock at a throw away price to raise school fees.
Education County Executive, Bashir Ibrahim said that insecurity incidents led to mass exodus of TSC employed teachers, mainly non-locals.
“When we came in, we had a meeting with the principals of primary schools, leaders, parents’ association and Boards of Management (BoM) chairpersons. They requested the county government to upscale the number of teachers. When we came in, teacher approval ratio was at approximately 1: 58,” he explained.
He said the governor implemented the recommendation to employ more teachers also in ECD centres, with the first batch of over 400 recruited to complement the 357 they found and now, most of them are on permanent and pensionable.
The number of teachers in ECD and primary schools will also be boosted with the completion of trainees at the Mandera TTC, who are undertaking Competency Based Education and Training (CBET) curriculum.
Ibrahim said Mandera, today, is among counties that have ensured ECD teachers are employed on permanent and pensionable, in line with Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) recommendation.
“We did this because we have a shortage of ECD and primary school teachers in Mandera. Always, we employ people from other areas and in case of anything, they leave. So we thought of getting our own teachers to be employed here. We built our own teacher's training college, we built our own Technical Training Institutes,” he explained.
And the initiatives are progressively bearing fruits, with the county leaders saying it has facilitated access, retention, participation and completion of education programmes.
