MP wants loans fund for secondary education established

Laikipia County Woman Representative Jane Apollos has urged lawmakers to consider establishing a loans fund for secondary school education.

She said the fund will help thousands of bright students who are dropping out of school due to lack of fees.

Mrs Apollos said that the Higher Education Loans Board should be mandated to manage the fund thereby ensuring poor students have access to education loans.

“It is now more expensive to educate a child in a secondary school than in the universities and the notion that education is free in Kenya is a total fallacy,” she said.

She observed that university students pay, on average about Sh100,000 per annum, the same amount in the current fees structures in many secondary schools.

She said more investment should be made in secondary school education to help increase the number of children transiting from primary schools.

She added that day schools were cheaper to run than boarding schools thereby enabling parents to afford the fees.

Mrs Apollos said providing loans for all children will also enable bright children to access extremely expensive national schools that have now become the preserve of the rich.

“We need to discourage the culture of having some schools for the rich and others for the poor as education is a basic human right and should take precedence of all other physical infrastructure,” she said.

She said the bursary kitty allocated to the CDF is a drop in the ocean and has no tangible impact on education in secondary schools since only a select few benefit at the expense of many needy cases.