There are all sorts of dull reports out there, but occasionally a true gem like Uwezo’s, “Are Our Children Learning? Numeracy and Literacy Across East Africa” comes along and makes your day.
The report by the East African education think tank Uwezo tells a great unintended story, beyond just examining the levels of numeracy and literacy in Kenya, Tanzania, and Kenya.
The study found that students in Kenya’s primary schools score higher in English, numeracy, and Kiswahili than their counterparts in Tanzania and Uganda. The results of the Kiswahili tests were surprising, because Tanzanians are the kings and queens of Kiswahili. As the old joke goes, “Kiswahili was born in Tanzania, died in Kenya, and was buried in Uganda.” Indeed, the survey did not even bother to test for Kiswahili in Uganda.
The performance of the poor and poorest children in Kenya is terrible, and swings wildly. They are poor, but relatively more stable in Tanzania and Uganda. One way of reading this is that if you are poor in Kenya, the likelihood that you will be worse off a few years down the road is much higher than in Tanzania and Uganda. In other words, the poor have more hope in the latter two countries than in Kenya.
The performance among children from middle-class and wealthy homes for Kenya, however, is remarkably stable and superior to that from the other two countries. And this suggests that in Kenya a child born into a rich family, can expect that a few years down the road her parents are more likely to still be as rich, or richer.
However, in Tanzania and Uganda, the likelihood is higher that rich parents today, could be poor tomorrow.
Why? As a colleague told me, in Kenya everyone, including schoolchildren, is running away from something. A primary school child in eastern Kenya will eat boiled maize for lunch, and it might be the only decent meal he has, for all the time he is in primary school.
Passing well and going to a secondary school will get him two meals — of boiled maize mixed with beans. This dual incentive to get on in life, and to have a full stomach, doesn’t exist in Tanzania and Uganda. In Uganda, the lazy, the enterprising, the not-so-poor, and the rich all tend to go to bed well fed on something. It is the closest to an equal-dinner-eating-opportunity country in the region.
In Nairobi, because it’s the global headquarters for a UN agency, and the centre of humanitarian operations for Somalia and South Sudan, and regional hub for several multinationals, the number of expatriates and diplomats have been estimated to be more than in all the other EAC countries combined — even twice over.
That means there are very many international children to educate. The competition by schools to attract them with some level of world-class education, has created a tide that has lifted a large number of Kenyan schools. And it’s also one reason why education is scandalously expensive in Kenya, compared with the same level in Uganda.
So it’s a long history of a relatively competitive free market economy, geography, history, and a bit of politics, not innate higher intelligence than other East Africans, that has given Kenyan primary school education the edge.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected]
