Education and Training for Self-Employment in Kenya

Abstract

At the very time that the World Bank was deciding in 1986 that its more than 20 years of support to ‘diversified’ secondary education – orienting schools to agriculture, construction, automobile repair and domestic science – was no longer justified by the data (King, 1991: 78), Kenya’s Ministry of Education was beginning a love affair with vocationalisation of both primary and secondary schools. Kenya’s shift was significantly affected by its sudden recognition and national ownership of what it called jua kali (informal sector) development, 14 years after the ILO had ‘discovered’ the informal sector in its Employment Mission to Kenya. This excerpt is about the multi-faceted attempt by the Kenyan government to orient schools more towards self-employment and enterprise – in other words to connect education and the informal sector.