The Beautiful Tree (19 page)

Had she been affected by free primary education? I asked. She was more forthcoming than Lydia had been, but her response carried the same message: nothing really had changed after free education because “there is overpopulation in the public schools.” None of her parents had wanted to move their children to the free primary schools; “They know that their children are not getting a good deal in those schools.” Indeed, she added, other private schools were opening now, even after the introduction of free primary education, whereas hers had been the only one in the district last year.

Far more important than any effect of free primary education was how to improve the learning of the children under her care. We continued our discussions over
chai
. Stella said that she wanted to introduce the Montessori method into her classrooms, and she asked me my views on the pros and cons of various curricula. It was wonderful to be sitting with her talking about education and the improvement of young lives.

Back in Nairobi, I interviewed prospective academics to become advisers to my research. The contrast to my conversation with Stella was stark and unfavorable. One young academic from the University of Nairobi was exactly the type of person I didn’t want. “What do you mean, private schools for the poor? Private schools are for the rich,” she began, and I felt that we were going to make little headway. She seemed to dislike my arrogance at coming to Kenya; likewise, I didn’t warm overmuch to her. Finally, oddly, she changed her tune, once I’d convinced her that I’d been to the slums and rural areas and had seen for myself: yes, low-cost private schools do exist, she now agreed, “and before free education, they served an important function, when it comes to access; but the question is, after access, what happens, it’s the quality that matters.”

But how did we know what their quality was like? I told her that was a research question, one I wanted to answer now, which was my reason for being in Kenya. No, they knew they were poor quality already, without any research, she told me: “They don’t satisfy any of the regulations. When the learning environment is not good, they will be harassed by the inspector and should be closed down. Buildings must be made of an appropriate material.” Why was learning in a brick building better than learning in a mud building? I asked. “Ah, I can’t answer that,” she said. And schools should operate in owned, not rented, buildings, she said: “The legal framework is that every school must have a title deed.” But she was adamant: private schools could exploit anyone because they didn’t mind what they delivered. I pointed out, “But the parents mind.” She shook her head, laughing with embarrassment: “Ah, the parents.” She clearly didn’t have a particularly high view of their capacities to choose.

So what did we find in the slums of Nairobi? It is estimated that about 60 percent of the population live in “unplanned informal settlements,” slums like Kibera. A household survey conducted in 2004 suggests that nearly three-quarters of Nairobi’s population lives “below the poverty line.”
⁵
In the slums, there are no public services— no publicly provided water, sewage, health, and, of course, no public education. But clearly, there were private schools. How many? James Shikwati assembled a team of researchers, graduate students from Nairobi universities. We trained the team in methods of finding and gaining access to schools, and in the use of an interview schedule for school managers. We found a great map of Kibera, created by a German aid agency, which showed how the Uganda railway snaked through the slum, and sent researchers out with copies to systematically sweep the whole area. As usual, we were only looking for primary and secondary schools, excluding “nonformal education” places, and schools serving only nursery students. The researchers were also asked to visit any government schools that the local residents said served Kibera.

The researchers found 76 private primary and secondary schools in the slum of Kibera (plus 59 nursery-only schools, which we didn’t examine further). This was quite remarkable—so many private schools where even sympathetic observers, like James Shikwati and his informers, had reported there were none. These schools served 12,132 children (excluding those in the nursery streams, which many of the primary and secondary schools also had). About a third of the schools were managed by women. And—a clear potential answer to the conundrum that private schools, for whatever reason, seemed to have emerged only after free public education was introduced—we found 1996 to be the average year the private schools were established. These schools clearly had not simply “mushroomed” only recently.

The researchers also visited five government schools that reportedly served the Kibera community, located on the outskirts of the slum area. In these schools, reported enrollment was 9,126—although many of these children came from the middle-class suburbs, not the slums. These visits enabled us to make several interesting comparisons between the public and private schools serving Kibera. First, Jane was right about the relative wages in public and private schools. Our researchers found that average salaries were three to five times higher in the government schools than in the private schools. And her suggestion about relative class size was also borne out by our evidence. The public schools had much higher pupil-teacher ratios than the private schools: in the private schools, the average pupil-teacher ratio was 21 to 1—and this was also the average class size, since there were no extra “floating” teachers for specialist subjects. In the public schools, the average pupil-teacher ratio was nearly three times higher, at 60 to 1. But that included several teachers who were specialists in different areas, and so the average class size was even larger.

Again, there wasn’t a big difference in the proportion of boys and girls in public and private schools—contrary to what might have been expected from the pronouncements of the development experts: In the private schools, there were roughly equal numbers of boys and girls (51 percent and 49 percent, respectively)—nothing like the gross gender inequality that we’d been led to expect. The figure was more or less identical in the public schools (49 percent boys and 51 percent girls).

All but 2 of the 76 private schools charged fees—the exceptions were both run by religious organizations. The average monthly fees in the rest ranged from 149 Kenyan shillings ($1.94) for nursery classes to 256 Kenyan shillings ($3.33) per month for eighth grade. We compared these figures with the “absolute poverty” line for Kenya as a whole, which was set at a monthly income of 3,174 Kenyan shillings ($41.33), excluding rent. The average fees per child would thus range from 4.7 percent to 8.1 percent of this minimum income level—which seemed to be pretty affordable, even for the poorest of the poor.

The excitement about free primary education, as we saw from former president Bill Clinton’s comments, was that it reportedly led to a massive increase in enrollment—an additional 1.3 million primary school children across Kenya, with a reported increase of over 48 percent in Nairobi alone. This was the crucial point that I wanted our research to explore. However, these headline figures don’t take into account what is happening in the private schools in the slums—because no one seems to have either been aware of their existence or thought they were worth bothering about. What difference would it make to these headline figures if changes in enrollment in these private schools were also taken into account?

My researchers asked managers, in both private and public schools, how free primary education had affected their
primary school
enrollment. They also asked if managers knew of any private schools that had closed altogether because of free primary education. What I found completely contradicted the accepted wisdom of the development experts, and provided a ready solution to their conundrum.

True, free primary education had dramatically increased the number of students enrolled in all five government primary schools reportedly serving Kibera. The total increase was 3,296 students, or 57 percent, an even higher growth rate than that reported for Nairobi. This might have been anticipated given that government schools on the periphery of slum areas would be expected to have enjoyed larger enrollment gains than schools farther away. It was, in any case, a dramatic increase, part of the reported increase in enrollment of 1.3 million nationwide.

However, taking into account what was happening in the private schools in the slums, a totally different picture emerged. Just as Jane had pointed out from her own school, in the vast majority of the private schools, free primary enrollment had led to a net decline in enrollment. This was not the case in all schools—around 30 percent of the schools reported that enrollment either had stayed roughly the same or had declined initially but since recovered, or even, like Huruma Kibera School, had actually increased. Adding the decline in the majority of schools, then subtracting the increase in the others, gave a
net decrease in private-sector enrollment of 6,571—far greater than the growth in public school enrollment.
That is, far from leading to a massive increase in the number of children in school, as the official figures acclaimed, there seemed to have been a large decrease.

However, this was not the end of the story. We were given the names of 33 private schools that school managers told us had closed since the introduction of free primary education. We went searching for the owners of these former private schools. After much detective work, we located and interviewed 32 of them. We also uncovered an additional three private schools that had closed since free primary education was introduced, the names of which existing school managers had not given us. Not all these 35 private schools had closed because of free primary education, however. In fact, two of the schools had relocated and were still open, whereas six had closed because of demolition work from the building of a bypass through Kibera. And two had closed, the managers candidly told us, because of mismanagement or lack of funds, unconnected with free primary education. However, in the 25 schools that had closed specifically because of free primary education, a total of
4,600 children
were reported to have been enrolled in the primary grades.

Pulling all this information together, I arrived at an estimate of the net decrease in the number of students enrolled from Kibera as a result of the introduction of free primary education. In private schools as a whole, I estimated that enrollment had declined by 11,171 since the introduction of free primary education. Set against the increase in government schools of 3,296, this meant an overall net
decrease
in enrollment of 7,875 primary school children since the introduction of free primary education. That is, my estimate indicated that about 8,000
fewer
students from Kibera were enrolled in primary schools than before the introduction of free primary education. This was quite astonishing.

Of course, the figure could be inaccurate. After all, it was based on the increases and declines in school enrollment
reported
by school managers. These may be incorrect simply because the managers may have remembered incorrectly. Or they may have felt some incentive to exaggerate their decline in student enrollment if they felt it would lead to financial or other assistance. It also assumed that all children who had left Kibera private primary schools could only have gone to the five primary government schools bordering Kibera, but they may have enrolled at other government schools once those bordering Kibera reached capacity. And children may also have relocated to other towns or rural areas, perhaps through natural movement of families in and out of the slum areas—but we had no way of quantifying this “natural” movement unconnected with free primary education.

Another question was why private schools were closing if relatively few children were transferring to government schools. One reason suggested by private school managers was that, as private schools ran on very tight budgets, the loss of even a few children might make them unviable financially and hence force them to close. And when we interviewed parents, they gave the impression that it was the more prosperous slum dwellers who could afford to send their children to government schools, given their “hidden costs”—reported to include requirements for school uniforms, parent-teacher association fees, and so forth. These more prosperous parents may have been the ones who could afford to pay fees on time in the private schools, and the private school managers may have felt their loss particularly acutely.

My team asked managers of private schools that were now closed for their views on what had happened to the children who had left their schools. They were not very optimistic. William Onyando, who had run Upendo Primary until he was forced to close because of free primary education, told us, “Some children joined other private schools and city council schools but others are still at home because of limited chances in the present schools.” Stephen Juma Kulisher, the former proprietor of Jesus Gospel Church School, said, “The needy children remained at home; others went to the local private school and some to the local government school.” Oscar Osir of the now-closed Sinai Academy told us, “Some joined the city council schools but others did not since they were orphaned and needed special treatment which the city council schools do not provide.”

The suggestion that some of the displaced children enrolled at other private schools in Kibera may help explain why a few of the remaining private schools experienced an increase in enrollment, but this cannot account for all the missing children. Some of the comments above suggest that some adversely affected by the introduction of free primary education were orphans who previously enjoyed free education at a local private school. Following the closure of these schools, such children may have been unable to find a free place at another local private school or couldn’t afford the “hidden costs” of enrolling at a government school, or couldn’t afford transportation costs to schools farther away, if local government schools were already oversubscribed.