- University enrolment has crossed 707,150 students in 2025, while academic staff have grown by only 6.4 per cent.
- The number of tutorial fellows has fallen from 3,498 to 3,119 and graduate assistants from 815 to 604, while adjunct staff have more than doubled.
- UASU has estimated that Kenya needs more than 35,000 academic staff, compared with about 10,000 lecturers currently in public universities.
Kenya is producing more graduates while struggling to retain the people qualified to teach them. University enrolment crossed 707,150 students in 2025, a 12.5 per cent increase in one year, yet academic staff grew only 6.4 per cent, from 15,383 to 16,434. Non-teaching staff fell by 7.5 per cent.
Gender imbalance remains a concern across higher education, particularly in senior academic and leadership positions. Women remain under-represented where academic power, research funding, promotions and institutional decision-making are concentrated.
The academic pipeline is thinning. Tutorial fellows fell from 3,498 to 3,119 in 2024, while graduate assistants dropped from 815 to 604. At the same time, adjunct academic staff more than doubled from 758 to 1,611 in 2025.
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The Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU) has estimated that Kenya needs more than 35,000 academic staff against roughly 10,000 lecturers in public universities. That estimate should be tested against official Commission for University Education (CUE) data.
Africa is also experiencing talent migration. The World Bank cites an African Union estimate of about 70,000 skilled professionals leaving Africa annually, while UNESCO has warned that the continent needs more PhD-level expertise to meet its development needs.
Stakeholders say factors driving movement of academics include salaries, research funding, laboratories, promotion opportunities, working conditions and professional recognition, with women facing additional structural barriers.
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Calls have been made for a deliberate academic-retention strategy including competitive salaries, funded research, permanent career pathways, stronger graduate-assistant programmes, transparent promotion systems and measures to close gender gaps in senior academic positions.
There have also been calls for universities to publish staffing figures disaggregated by gender, rank, discipline, contract type and institution, and for the creation of diaspora programmes that bring Kenyan scholars abroad into teaching, supervision and research.
By Yabesh Onwonga
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