Kenya: UK to re-fund free education

  1. Posted on Wednesday 17 March 2010 - 11:30
    Muhyadin
    Muhyadin Ahmed Roble, AfricaNews reporter in Nairobi, Kenya
    The United Kingdom is to re--fund free primary education programme in Kenya via non-governmental organisations and will release $20 million, officials said.
    kenya student
    The payment of free primary education, which was stopped after officials were accused of stealing £880,000, is now expected to start in next month.

    The British government rejected to pay the finance through the Kenya government until corruption allegations are investigated.

    “We’ll be looking at a number of different methods directly to schools, paying for textbooks, helping the poor and most vulnerable children,” Alistair Fernie, the head of the U.K.’s department for International Development in Kenya said on Tuesday.

    Alistair Fernie added “We are going to change our funding from the government to other channels. We have £20 million which is about a quarter of our total aid budget for Kenya allocated to education and we plan to disburse the same amount of money.”

    Kenya government is planning to return the Sh230 million which was stolen from the free primary education finance, according to Fernie report.

    The free primary education fund had been going directly to Kenya government since 2005 to September 2009.

    U.K. has pulled out of the development for the ministry of education over the loss of 1.3 million dollars last December.

    In January, also the United States of America has released to suspend a $7 million programme fund for free primary education in Kenya which was planned to provide to the Education ministry in this year Kenya's education ministry.

    Kenya is ranked as the most corrupt country in East Africa, according to the campaign group Transparency International.

    Kenya began free primary education in 2003 and schools were quickly registered as more than one million children who had never been to school.

    More than 5.9 million people have enrolled to the primary schools in 2002 while another 7.6 million went to schools in 2005, according to the Unicef.

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