More than 70,000 of school aged children in Turkana County remain out of school due to various drawbacks among them high dropout rates caused by poverty, early marriages and unwanted pregnancies.
Hundreds of children are also involved in child labour in Kakuma town and in the fishing sector in Lake Turkana due to displacement by drought and floods which decimate livestock, the key source of income and food to the local communities
According to the County Director of Education Turkana Stanley Lubanga, those out of school comprise 30 per cent of the school aged children with girls being the main culprits due to late enrolment.
Low entry to schools, Lubanga said was compounded by high dropout rates especially among their girl child since most parents preferred to marry off their underage daughters.
Some girls enrolled in school when they were already mature and hence recorded low concentration and transition levels, a situation made worse by the culture of beading of girls making them assume they were ready for marriage.
Most parents, the director said appeared to be more comfortable with the livestock offered to them as dowry against a background where schools remain ill equipped and far apart.
The long distances forced a majority of young children to cover long distances to access the schools.
Campaigns to return the girls who ended giving birth at an early age due to unwanted pregnancies have not been very successful due to low presence of children rights’ organisation promoting education in the county.
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However, one organisation, Save The Children has recorded a number of successes in ensuring the resumption of learners to school by teen mothers through a campaign which bring together stakeholders from the government and the community.
The organisation has been funding various programmes where learners resuming education after years of abandonment are assisted with various facilities including uniform and meals through schools’ feeding programmes.
According to Education Officer Save The Children Rodger Wekesa, the organisation had been facilitating Chiefs and their assistants to visit villages and homesteads to identify children who are out of school and entice them to resume schooling.
The organisation has also been mobilising mentors to participate in school forums to encourage children and especially out of school girls to return to school and access education instead of falling into early marriages.
Efforts are also being done to have the Government facilitate parents, majority of whom are pastoralists and had lost their birth certificates and National Identification cards get the documents so that their children could register for NEMIS identification in a bid to access capitation.
The pursuit of these documents by most parents, according to the head teacher of Loruth Primary School in the County, Abdi Ahmed has been expensive and tiresome forcing many to abandon that bid.
Unfortunately failure to access the documents, has led to long delays in release of Government funds to various schools disrupting learning for months.
“Our school has not received funding from the Government for the last two terms and this has badly affected learning with some of the basic required at school lacking and non-teaching staffs going unpaid for months.
By Robert Nyagah
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