Cabinet Secretary for National Treasury and Economic Planning John Mbadi before The Standing Committee on Devolution and Intergovernmental Relations to deliberate on the commercial bank accounts operated by county governments contrary to the law at Bunge Towers, Parliament, Nairobi. July 17th,2025. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]
Failure to invest in education will stunt real growth
Opinion
By
Ken Opalo
| Jul 26, 2025
If we cannot figure out how to give all Kenyan children a quality education, we should perhaps consider winding up as a going concern. This week Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi announced that the government can no longer afford to fund free primary education.
The announcement came with the usual casual approach of an administration whose officials habitually act as if governing a country of 55 million is the side hustle to their main job of making money off the state.
Just to be on the same page, we live in an age in which countries that fail to invest heavily in their human capital will be left in the dust. Countries with high-quality human capital stand to benefit immensely from technologies of the future – including, but certainly not limited to, artificial intelligence.
Without high-quality human capital, we will struggle to add value to anything and, therefore, grow. That is a fate we must avoid. Our population growth and rates of urbanisation mean we have no choice but to build a fast-growing economy characterised by rapidly rising productivity among our workers. We cannot do that by not investing in education.
It is high time we reoriented our development policies to focus on human development. All the roads, dams, tourist arrivals, and flower exports in the world will not matter if at the end of the day Kenyan households are unable to retain some of the value so generated for their own sustenance.
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For far too long, we have had debt-fueled growth on the back of ever-rising government spending. This growth has not produced much broad-based development. Incomes have stagnated for the better part of 20 years. This is not a coincidence. Our inability to invest in our people limits our ability to benefit from economic expansion.
Beyond education, you see the same mentality expressed in other sectors. Our metric of success in agriculture, for example, continues to be the total output, as opposed to productivity. Real development comes from rising productivity – the ability to do more with the same amount of inputs. And if we focus on productivity, it would be impossible to arrive at the conclusion that we need to redouble our investments in human capital. This would include things like food and nutrition, health, education, housing, and general improvements in the lived environment (especially in urban areas).
Again, we are not even talking about higher education here. Our government is admitting that they cannot guarantee investments in basic education. This is utterly shameful.
There is an alternative universe in which the government actually took time to rationalise the way we approach the education sector. How might we lower the wage bill (by including in-king payments like housing for teachers, for example)? How might we standardise and scale training?
What sort of curriculum do we actually need? How can we curate a culture of continuous learning and improvement? These are the questions we should be asking, not engaging in accounting gimmicks designed to create room in the budget for corruption.
The writer is a professor at Georgetown University
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