Kenya is infamous for having one of the highest youth unemployment rates in East Africa. According to latest data obtained from Statista, youth unemployment in the country stood at 16.3% as of Q1 2021.
This is partly due to the fact that many public universities in the country churn out “unmarketable” graduates. And now, the Kenyan Government is set to put an end to the trend.
Kenya’s Universities Fund, a government agency that was established in 2012 for the purpose of financing public universities, recommended in a newly proposed funding formula that universities whose graduates fail to secure jobs within a year of graduation should have their funding slashed.
“Performance-based funding is funding aimed at allocating a portion of universities education budget according to specific performance measures. It makes funding allocating more transparent and more competitive. The key performance indicators to be considered will be four-year graduation rate, graduate employability rate (one year after graduation) and research inputs,” said part of the draft document, as seen by Business Daily.
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Note that prior to this, the formula for funding state-run universities in the country has mainly been based on the student population per school as well as the cost of courses.
But the Universities Fund argued that this is no longer sustainable, seeing as some of these universities admit students to study courses with very little or no job prospects.
If the proposed formula gets approved, most of the public universities offering courses that are not “marketable” will see their funding drastically reduced.
Recently, Kenya has seen the number of university enrollees increase significantly, even as public universities, campuses and courses have equally been adjusted to accommodate them all.
In total, the country has 102 public universities, and the World Bank had recently advised that some of the schools be merged in order to cut down on the cost of running them.
