Kenya’s junior secondary schools are staring at a funding crisis after the government announced sweeping budget cuts amounting to billions of shillings in capitation and infrastructure allocations.
On Tuesday, September 9, Principal Secretary for Basic Education Belio Kipsang revealed that the government had scaled down junior secondary school financing by a staggering Ksh20.7 billion, a move that has triggered anxiety among education stakeholders.
According to Kipsang, schools will now receive Ksh25.46 billion in capitation, far below the Ksh46.19 billion requested by the Ministry of Education to adequately sustain learning activities in the newly rolled-out junior secondary system.
In a double setback, the State also slashed infrastructure funding, allocating just Ksh3.4 billion for school upgrades—an astonishing Ksh1.6 billion shortfall compared to the Ksh5 billion the ministry had sought.
The announcement has raised fears that classrooms could become overcrowded, with insufficient desks, laboratories, and teaching materials, undermining the government’s ambitious Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) reforms.
Education unions, parents, and school heads have already warned that the cuts could cripple junior secondary learning just two years after the system was rolled out. “This is a betrayal of learners who are at a critical stage of transition,” one school principal told The Standard, adding that schools were already struggling to cope with large student numbers.
While the government insists that the cuts are necessary to streamline spending, critics argue that shortchanging the education sector risks widening inequality and lowering learning standards for millions of Kenyan children.
With the capitation and infrastructure purse now squeezed, the future of Kenya’s junior secondary schools hangs in the balance—threatening to turn the government’s own flagship education reforms into an underfunded experiment.
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