Why TSC hiring policy is unfair to married women
Opinion
By
Dr Carren Otieno
| Jul 21, 2025
The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) proclaims itself an equal opportunity employer, yet its 2024/2025 post-primary recruitment guidelines tell a different story. Clause 18 on page 3 explicitly declares that preference will be given to applicants from their respective sub-counties or counties.
At first glance, favouring local candidates appears logical, as schools want teachers who know the community. But this seemingly neutral rule clashes with a deeply rooted social reality. It is well known that many Kenyan women relocate after marriage.
The rule works against women, as most citizens obtain their national identity card (ID) while still living in their natal county, typically in late adolescence. When a woman marries and moves from one county to another, her ID still reflects the birth county. Under Clause 18, she is automatically less competitive in her new county, as she is forced to prove local origin or watch vacancies go to those whose IDs match the county code. Her alternatives are bleak: she either stays put and loses out or travels home and separates from her family to apply in her birth county, uprooting her children and undermining household stability. Either way, the policy imposes a motherhood penalty dressed up as administrative tidiness.
According to the most recent TSC workforce report, women actually constitute a slim majority of Kenyan teachers: 204,373 out of 406,860 on the payroll. Achieving near parity was a milestone, but parity in headcount is meaningless if recruitment filters silently screen out married women who have changed residence. In effect, the rule tells over 200,000 female educators to marry carefully, or be prepared to commute across counties for the rest of their careers.
A constitutional and economic contradiction appears when reflecting on Article 27 of the Constitution, which guarantees every person equal protection and equal benefit of the law, adding that women and men have the right to equal treatment. A guideline that systematically tilts opportunity away from married women contradicts this promise. It also undercuts Kenya’s economic goals. The country created 782,300 new jobs in 2024, 90 per cent in the informal sector. Skilled, credentialled teachers are precisely the kind of formal sector professionals Kenya must keep productively employed to raise wages and educational quality.
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For an inclusive policy, TSC can correct course without sacrificing the goal of community-rooted staffing by recognising current residence, accepting proof of domicile—utility bills, tenancy agreements, tax records—alongside county of origin; introducing a spousal relocation clause; giving automatic local status points to applicants whose spouses already teach or work in the target county; creating a digital mobility register; allowing teachers to update their residence online, verified by chiefs or ward administrators to prevent fraudulent address hopping; and monitoring gender impact by publishing an annual audit showing recruitment outcomes by sex, marital status, and county to ensure new fixes are working.
Kenya cannot afford to lose passionate educators to outdated bureaucracy. Nor can she tell women to choose between nurturing a family and serving the nation’s classrooms. Updating Clause 18 is not charity; it is smart governance.
It honours constitutional equality, supports family cohesion, and widens the pool of qualified teachers willing to serve where they actually live. It is time TSC matched its equal opportunity rhetoric with practice. A residence-aware, gender-sensitive recruitment framework would signal that Kenya values both competent teaching and the evolving roles of women in society. Anything less keeps the door to our classrooms half shut.
—The writer is a lecturer at Rongo University. caadhiambo@rongovarsity.ac.ke