Kenya's shuttling lecturers: university shortages are taking a toll

At the beginning of every week, 36-year-old Gertrude Micere Miano has a tough decision to make. She has to decide which classes to drop from her itinerary and which ones to keep. If it were up to her, she says, she would attend all classes, but circumstances, some personal and others systemic have conspired to limit her choices.

“I can’t be at more than one place at once,” she says. “All I have to do is make sure that my students don’t fall behind on their coursework.”

Miano is one of many Kenyan lecturers who teach in more than one institution of higher learning. She has three teaching jobs only one of which is permanent. The rest are on part-time basis. “Almost everyone in my department does the same,” says the economics lecturer.

According to a recent study carried out by the Kenya Institute of Public Policy and Research (Kippra), up to 50% staff at public universities do part-time jobs, mostly teaching in other universities and spending their days crisscrossing from one university hall to another, oblivious of the effect such moves have on the general quality of education.

“We do our best to ensure that some semblance of quality is maintained,” she says. But over the years, quality has suffered.

Last year the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA), a body created to regulate higher education in the region put out a scathing report card on the level of preparedness graduates from east African universities have for the job market.

The study showed Uganda to have the worst record, with at least 63% of graduates found to lack job-market skills followed closely by Tanzania where 61% of graduates are ill-prepared. In Burundi and Rwanda, 55% and 52% of graduates respectively were perceived to be incompetent while in Kenya, 51% of graduates are believed to be unfit for jobs. All the east African nations have an acute lecture shortage, with each country dealing with these shortages in its own unique way. For instance in Uganda, poor funding and a shortage in numbers have led lecturers to seek better teaching opportunities abroad, where there is a smaller workload and better pay.

“It is not enough to castigate the lecturers. A lot of factors are working against them,” said Professor Sammy Kubasu, chairman of Kenya’s University Academic Staff Union, the umbrella body charged with looking after the welfare of university academic staff.

Kubasu argues that lecturers shuttling from one campus to another are simply filling a gap in service provision:

“Currently the average lecturer to student ratio stands at 1:500. That is how bad the situation is. In some instances, the ration can go up to 1:900 students. It is this shortfall in the number of lecturers that has resulted in some of our members taking up more than one job. They are simply trying to cater for the huge numbers of student enrolment.” The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural agency (Unesco) recommends a ratio of 1:45.

Kenya’s lecturer/student imbalance has not always been there. “The rain started beating us in 1998,” says Tiberius Barasa, a policy researcher with Kippra. “That is when we lost it in terms of higher education.”

In the late 1990s, Kenya’s economy slumped. The only way to get the country out of recession was to involve the Bretton-Woods institutions. One of the conditions they set for the then government before they committed to resuscitating the fledgling economy was the introduction of a structural readjustment programme that was basically aimed at curtailing government expenditure.

“As the government tightened its belt, one of the sectors that suffered was higher education. Supplementary funding to universities was halted. Thus universities were left to fend for themselves,” Barasa says.

Necessity is the mother of all invention. And in 1998, desperate to get more funds to support itself, Kenya’s oldest university, the University of Nairobi introduced self-sponsored students programmes. This was a parallel enrolment programme that saw students pay for the university courses they wanted even if they hadn’t made the grade. Soon after, the other public universities followed suit, with some doubling, and others even tripling their student numbers.

Before this move, a secondary-school leaver would have to attain certain grade for them to enrol for a degree programme. For a student to get into the school of medicine, for example, he or she needed to get straight As in O-level examinations. However, in the parallel enrolment programme, the grades seldom mattered. One could enrol in whatever course one wanted as long as they could afford the tuition fees.

“Yes, the money started coming into the universities. But the number of lecturers remained constant. Soon classes that previously had 40 students had 100 students. This was the same through all degree programmes,” Miano says. “In a bid to cope with these numbers, universities had to create more class hours. This meant more teaching hours for a fixed number of staff. So more, from the existing pool had to be recruited by other universities.”

Miano says lecturers seldom say no. “The pay from one job is too little,” she says. But the better pay comes at a cost. “Some weeks are bad. At times I am required to travel two or three times a week to universities outside Nairobi where I am based,” she says.

During such weeks, she seldom sees her three-year-old daughter and husband. “With these pressures, my output in academia is obviously affected. You get home tired and have to mark exams or set new ones or prepare lesson plans … It becomes a hectic cycle.”

After years of agitation, university teaching staff finally got a pay rise last year after a month-long countrywide strike. After the negotiated deal, tutorial fellows and assistant lecturers will now earn £650 every month. Professors earn £1,400 before allowances.

“We are the lowest paid in the region,” says Kubasu. “Individuals who could have filled the existing gaps in personnel at our universities are going into better paying jobs in the corporate world.”

Kenya’s central government, which is in charge of remuneration and regulation of the higher education sector, is not blind to the existing challenges faced by a rapidly growing sector. All major Kenyan universities have satellite campuses throughout the country that continue to get fresh enrolments on a daily basis, further tipping the already crippling imbalances.

Kenya’s education cabinet secretary Jacob Kaimenyi, himself a former university vice chancellor says the government are aware of all these problems. “We are however in the process of streamlining all these issues and soon we shall have one of the best higher education system on the continent,” he says.

The minister says his office is aware that lecturers not only hold part-time teaching jobs elsewhere, but that they also moonlighting by doing consultancy work for international and non-governmental organisations. “We are working on this and coming up with stringent regulations to ensure both lecturers and students get the best out of tertiary education,” Kaimenyi says.

While the master draughtsmen of the country’s education blueprint continue to draw the best plans, students currently in the system continue to struggle, getting less instruction, time and attention from individuals who should play a pivotal role in shaping their young futures.

For the next three months we’ll be running a special focus on the development of higher education in Africa. Do you have experience of the sector, or an informed point of view on this subject? We’re looking for comment and stories of best practice to run as part of our series on GDPN; contact us on globaldevpros@theguardian.com with “higher education in Africa” in the subject line.

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