Emerging Issues from the Education Research in Urban Slum Areas

With a population of over 9,000 primary school-age children in the two informal settlements, the eight public schools within and around these informal settlements cannot meet the huge demand for primary education among parents and their children in the informal settlements. [...] In the absence of new public schools in the informal settlements, identifying effective strategies for link these private non-formal schools that largely serve these communities to the formal education system will be critical in ensuring the very poor benefit in some ways from the free primary education policy. [...] From Table 1, in 2005, the results from the ERP study show that the urban informal communities of Korogocho and Viwandani have high GER (100.7%) although consistently lower than that for the communities living in the urban formal settlements of Jericho and Harambee (106.8). [...] In fact, only 52% of the youth living in Korogocho and Viwandani informal settlements that took the KCPE exam in 2006 received the minimum required score to gain access into one of Kenya’s public secondary schools, compared 79% of the youth living in neighboring formal settlements. [...] The main challenges that are of policy relevance are two fold: One, the lack of formal recognition of the informal schools by the MoE; and two, the low quality education being provided by informal schools in informal settlements.