KCSE: Migori girl commits suicide after scoring C -
What you need to know:
Carren believed she had the potential of making it to university and pulled all stops to achieve her dream.
She went to the extent of changing schools— from Osingo Secondary in Migori to a Kuria-based institution.
In 2016, Carren Ouma wrote her Form Four exams and scored a C minus at Osingo Secondary in Migori County.
She was not happy with the score and decided to take one more stab at the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) tests.
SCHOOLS
Carren believed she had the potential of making it to university and pulled all stops to achieve her dream.
She went to the extent of changing schools— from Osingo Secondary to a Kuria-based institution.
She wrote the exams in November and had high hopes of scoring C+ and above when Education Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang'i released the results on Wednesday.
Like the rest of the candidates who wanted to know their fate, Carren was restless.
She spent hours chasing her results online and offline.
She sent SMSes and even logged on to Kenya National Examinations Council website just to know how she had performed.
KURIA
And she did.
However, instead of lifting her spirits, her hopes were shuttered on realizing that she had not performed any better— she had maintained her C minus grade.
For this, she committed suicide, according to her parents and the local chief.
Carren, Osingo Location Chief Mwai Odila told the Nation, jumped into a well located in their homestead on Wednesday night.
Mr Odila said the girl had repeated Form Four with an aim of getting a better grade.
"She first sat her exams at Osingo Secondary before moving to a school in Kuria and still ended up getting the same grade," he said.
UNIVERSITY
Shocked parents of the girl were unable to utter a word when the Nation visited their home on Thursday.
Police later took the body to Migori County Referral Hospital mortuary.
Hundreds of thousands of this year’s Form Four leavers have been locked out of universities and other tertiary institutions.
The results released on Wednesday indicate that only 70,073 out of the 611,952 candidates — just 11.5 per cent — managed the minimum university entry qualification of mean grade C+.
In 2016, some 88,929 qualified.
