Nairobi, Aug. 13 -- Over the past three years, the mood around education has shifted significantly, thanks to the issue of funding. In 2023, a taskforce - the Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms - was formed to come up with recommendations on a financing model that would sustainably support university education in Kenya.

The result of this exercise was a student-centered financing structure, which categorised them into five tiers based on their family income, and allocated varying amounts of scholarships and loans as per those bands.

However, this has eventually proved to be unsustainable, both for families, which cannot afford the high amounts of money which they are asked to pay as fees, and for the government, on what it ...