School Fees exclude poor from education

Making matters harder, the Kenya government also introduced an extra year of primary education in 1985. As it did not have the resources to pay for the extra classrooms and workshops, parents were requested to share educational costs by building the necessary buildings. In each school the parents committee, together with the head teacher, worked out the amount each parent would have to pay. The children of those parents who could not pay were not allowed to continue in school. So, from a 90% attendance at primary school at government and formal private schools in the City of Nairobi in 1976, numbers have plummeted to 47% today. Nowadays voluntary organisations such as the Mukuru Promotion Centre cater for a further 27%, while the remaining 26% of children loiter on the streets, begging, scavenging and engaging in petty crime. Most sniff glue in order to get "high" to forget for a time the pain of hunger and the misery of their existence.