- For the elite and technical pathways introduced under CBE, there is effectively no national supply of qualified educators.
- The teaching workforce drawn from the North Eastern region is trained overwhelmingly in the humanities, which reproduces the shortage rather than relieving it.
- Retooling is welcome, but it cannot supply the specialist qualification these subjects require.
- Incentives reward the place a teacher serves, not the subject he or she is qualified to teach.
The Competency-Based Education (CBE) framework introduces specialised and technical learning areas the Kenyan school system has never taught. For these pathways there is effectively no national supply of qualified educators. The reason is neither accidental nor obscure: the training pipeline did not exist under 8-4-4, and has not since been built. The country legislated a demand it had made no arrangement to supply, and learners bear the consequences, most acutely in the North Eastern region.
The scale of the requirement is clear once the curriculum is set out. At Junior School, Grades 7 to 9, learners take nine core learning areas, among them integrated science, agriculture and nutrition, pre-technical studies, and creative arts and sports. At Senior School, Grades 10 to 12, they take seven subjects: four compulsory areas, namely English or Kenyan Sign Language, Kiswahili, Mathematics in its Core or Essential form, and Community Service Learning, and three electives from one of three pathways.
STEM covers the sciences, agriculture, computer studies and technical fields including aviation and engineering. Social Sciences carries humanities, business, languages and religious education. Arts, Media and Sports covers theatre, film, fine arts, sports science, media technology, marine and fisheries technology, aviation studies, and woodwork and building construction. Each is a discipline requiring its own trained teacher.
The first issue is therefore the shortage of teachers for specialised subjects, which the Teachers Service Commission has documented. Before the National Assembly in March 2024, it put the national shortfall at 98,281 and named the areas where gaps had opened — media technology, woodwork, jewellery and ornament making, sculpture, leather craft, marine and fisheries technology, general science and indigenous languages. Read against the elective menu, the overlap is near total. By December 2025, it put the senior school rollout shortfall at 58,590, the STEM pathway alone requiring some 35,111 teachers. Garissa, Wajir and Mandera feel this more sharply than most, having entered the reform already understaffed. Residents told the Presidential Working Party in Mandera of a shortage of 1,866 teachers, and asked that teachers be trained from the area rather than posted in.
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A second consideration is the composition of the regional workforce, trained overwhelmingly in the humanities. Garissa University, the first public university in Northern Kenya and built on the grounds of the former Garissa Teachers Training College, is the natural source of the region’s teachers. Its School of Education, Arts and Social Sciences offers Bachelor of Education degrees in Arts, Science and Early Childhood, and arts degrees in geography, community development and political science.
These are sound programmes, yet none produces a teacher of media technology, marine and fisheries technology or building construction. The national pattern is identical, Education Arts being the largest single field of study in Kenyan universities at 104,747 students against 53,797 in Education Science. A young person who qualifies locally and returns home to teach therefore arrives equipped for the Social Sciences pathway alone. Local training as constituted entrenches the imbalance rather than correcting it.
The third matter is incentive, and meaningful provisions exist. Garissa, Wajir and Mandera are gazetted hardship areas whose teachers draw a monthly allowance, and specialists warn that reducing it would deepen shortages in arid regions, where it is among the few inducements to accept a difficult posting. The Bill sponsored by Mandera South MP Abdul Haro, entrenching hardship allowances in the Fourth Schedule of the TSC Act rather than leaving them to administrative circulars, merits support on the same reasoning.
It has also extended priority promotion to teachers in acting headship roles in Isiolo, Lamu, Marsabit, Wajir, Garissa and Mandera. Yet all reward is where a teacher serves, or how long she has acted, and none for the subject she is qualified to teach. The allowance accrues identically to a teacher of Kiswahili and to the only instructor in a county capable of teaching woodwork. Until a scarce specialism carries a premium of its own, few candidates will elect the harder and thinner subject.
The fourth matter is regulation, and here the most usable instrument lies. Under section 11(e) of the TSC Act, the Commission must facilitate professional development, and has done so by accrediting service providers, presently Kenyatta University, Mount Kenya University, Riara University and the Kenya Education Management Institute, delivering through centres in all 290 sub-counties. Ahead of the transition, it retooled senior school teachers twice, in August and from 1 to 19 December 2025, covering all 55 learning areas and reaching more than 30,000 teachers from 9,626 institutions.
That effort was necessary and is welcome, but should not be mistaken for a remedy to this shortage. Retooling reorients a qualified teacher toward new pedagogy, assessment and curriculum design; it cannot confer content mastery in a discipline never studied. A cascade of three weeks will not produce an instructor of marine and fisheries technology or building construction, because competence of that order comes from initial specialist qualification, not a refresher.
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The Commission should therefore direct its accreditation powers at the shortage itself. Qualification pathways should be commissioned for the learning areas it has named, and institutions capable of delivering them accredited, which in most cases means technical and vocational institutions, not universities. Garissa University should be supported to mount teacher education in the technical and creative areas, since a pipeline confined to the humanities guarantees a permanently narrowed pathway offering.
The three county governments of Mandera, Wajir and Garissa should pool bonded sponsorship, since no single county can justify funding a specialism requiring two teachers, whereas three together can. The Ministry and the Commission should publish, termly and by county, the number of senior schools gazetted for each pathway and the number of teachers qualified in each specialised area. No such figure is in the public domain, and its absence is instructive: a reform cannot be measured against a workforce that has never been counted.
The sequence is the whole of the lesson. A pathway cannot be opened before the workforce that teaches it has been trained. Having reversed that order, the country owes the region the effort required to correct it.
By Ibrahim Adan
Mr Adan is a senior educationist and an education policy analyst specialising in teacher workforce planning and management.
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