By Roy Hezron
The adoption of the proposed Universities Funding Framework will see government fund universities according to performance and not enrollment.
The framework was developed by the funding agency Universities Fund (UF).
According to the draft model, the Performance Based Funding (PBF) will aim at allocating a portion of universities education budget according to specific performance measures such as course completion, degree completion, equity and gender considerations.
“It is a model that provides a fuller picture of how successfully universities have used their government appropriations to support clearly stated objectives or targets,” reads a draft copy of the framework in part.
UF will reward universities for efficiency in teaching, research and community service and encourage competition among universities which will stimulate the evolution of centres of excellence.
“It makes funding allocation more transparent and more competitive through redistributive funding formulae mainly based on performance,” stated the proposed framework.
Currently, public universities are largely financed by the government under the Differentiated Unit Cost (DUC) system where funding is based on the cost of mounting a degree programme. For private universities, UF issues conditional grants for specific programmes, a model which has caused disquiet among institutions.
The DUC is the amount of money required by an institution to teach one academic programme per year per student. It pegs the disbursement of university funds on how much it costs to teach each programme in one academic year. It also lumps together all university programmes into 14 clusters.
This implied that universities with the highest number of students enrollment get the highest funding. In the 2021 university placement, only ten universities received over 3, 000 students being placed in different programmes a situation that might increase their enrollment hence being assured of a higher allocation.
These universities are Kenyatta University (6,733), Maseno University (6,659), Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) which received 6, 529 students, the University of Nairobi (6,407), Mount Kenya University (5,487), Moi University (5,187), Kisii University (4, 600), Chuka University (4, 133), Egerton University (4, 039), and Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology (MMUST) which received 3, 893 students.
Key Performance Indicators
The proposed framework will consider the key performance indicators which are a Four year Graduation Rate, Graduate Employability Rate and Research outputs (doctoral and post-doctoral graduates), the patents and licenses issued and research publication units for a specific year and the number of Industrial attachments and internships facilitated with the industry by the university.
Others are the number of joint programmes with industry, commerce and civil Society organizations in each year, female students enrolled in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), persons with disability and students admitted from disadvantaged socio-economic background and trainings undertaken on financial management and governance for councils, senior management and senior faculty members.
A research conducted by CPS International titled ‘State of Graduate Employability in Kenya’ between November 2019 to January 2020 to determine how employable Kenyan graduates were found out that the University of Nairobi (UoN) was ranked the top university nationally with index score of 26.8 per cent.
Other universities in the top ten were Kenyatta University (KU) with an index score of 26.8 per cent, Moi University (18.1 per cent), Mount Kenya University (16.5 per cent), Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (15.2 per cent), Maseno University (13.6 per cent), Egerton University (13.5 per cent), Technical University of Kenya (8.4 per cent), MUST (7.1 per cent) and United States International University (USIU) with six per cent.
Capital Grants Allocation Criterion
In the proposed framework, UF developed a capital grant allocation criterion of whose model will include teaching Input and Output, Research Output, Institutional Factor and Age of University.
Teaching input grant will be granted in accordance to the courses being offered to government sponsored students and its respective levels that is diploma, undergraduate, masters or PhD. Teaching output grant will be allocated according to each university’s graduation rate.
Research Output Grant will be given to universities depending on the number of publications the university had published in the previous year. This grant will consider the socio-economic impact that the research in the university has had in its surrounding.
Institutional factor grant will consider the number of persons with special needs in a university while the Age of University parameter aims to aid young universities put up infrastructure.
