Basic Education Provision in Kenya's Urban Informal Settlements

Background

Urban informal settlements are a feature of Kenya’s urban centres such as Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu, with Nairobi having the longest history of all. For instance, Kibera informal settlement in Nairobi has a history dating back to the colonial period, when Africans were barred from the city’s designated residential areas as these were reserved for Europeans and Asians. Kenyans who came to Nairobi city in search of work had to create informal residential settlements in the low-lying areas outside the central business district of the city to provide temporal shelter for low-level factory workers, retirees, single families and employment seekers. Accordingly, from the onset, urban informal settlements were conceived from a position of disadvantage, with non-existent or very limited general amenities, poor schools (if any) and a general lack of resources (Macharia, 2007).

In 1963, the first government of the Republic of Kenya declared Kibera urban informal settlements illegal. In this respect, essential services to these settlements such as road construction linking them to other areas of the city were not provided by the local authorities. Consequently, residents, particularly children, found it difficult to access education like their counterparts elsewhere in the country. Notably, this form of marginalization remains the reality for many of the estimated 2 million residents of informal settlements in Kenyan cities and towns, most of whom are still alienated from accessing most of the social services including education.

The growth of urban informal settlements in major towns and cities still continues unabated. For instance, according to the 2009 National Population and Housing Census, the population of Nakuru urban was 307,990 and was projected to reach 393,101 in 2017. Nakuru urban informal settlement is associated with development of industry mostly related to the agricultural sector, milling, tanning, oil refining and agro-products. Similarly, in 2012, the urban population statistics indicated that Eldoret town had 289,380 people, mainly attributed to urbanization and was projected to rise rapidly, while Kisumu city had a population of 131,062, in 2009 yet projected to increase by 8 per cent to reach 491,893 by 2017 (KNBS, 2009 Kenya Population and Housing Census Vol. 1A, 2010). Nairobi had an estimated population of 3.36 million people in 2011 while Mombasa had about 939,000 people as per the 2009 census. It is however, notable that the growth of informal settlements in cities and major towns in Kenya has been influenced by nearly the same factors including industrialization, population growth, urban centre growth, land tenure system and high land prices and house rents (Anyuro and Chege, 2012).

The Kenyan Household Population Census (2009) established that close to 2 million children aged 6-13 years were out of school. These children are distributed across specific areas, key of which are the urban informal settlements, arid-districts and other pockets of poverty. Those in urban informal settlements of Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu are engaged in child labour, with the largest proportion in domestic work, petty trade and mining. The factors that contribute to this include the cost of education, inadequate supply of formal schools in urban informal settlement, poverty, poor quality of education in urban informal settlement, and HIV and AIDS. Of all these informal settlements, Nairobi’s Kibera informal settlement has been over-emphasized in literature to the extent that it has attracted much more attention of both governmental and non-governmental educational interventions, interventions which in turn have tended to marginalize children in informal settlements in other cities and towns.