Kenya: With Schools Closed, Pupils Can Only Turn to Libraries

By Y Niccola Milnes
Candidates are set to start writing the Kenya Certificate of Secondary and Primary Education exams mid-October.
But teachers have been told that under no circumstances are they to report to their schools. Therefore, students are having to find ways, in their already poorly resourced schools, to not only access learning material, but to go through revisions and practice exams on their own.
Teachers play an enormous role during revision, especially given the fact that in Kenya the student-textbook ratio is 3:1. It is not hard to find classes where there is only one textbook to go around.
One of the reasons cited for the closing of schools is the insecurity building in classrooms as students sat idle. If the students had material for revision and studying, and a conducive environment to do so, perhaps this would not have been the case.


This is why libraries in schools play such a vital role. In Kenya, most schools do not have enough textbooks to go around, let alone revision or recreational reading material and a place to house it all.
If these schools had well-stocked libraries that served as a quiet place for study and inquisition, students who wanted to continue their work despite the strike would have at least been able to do so. However, as it stands, only two per cent of public schools have libraries.
The Knowledge Empowering Youth Trust designs and donates libraries for schools. The carefully curated book lists help support the curriculum, as well as provide a breadth of recreational reading material.
KEY donations often include furniture and IT uploaded with eKitabu e-learning packages, all the curriculum textbooks, revision books, and mock exams in an easy to access format that allows for group learning.
The eKitabu e-learning package can be accessed on the smart board included in the KEY Library, so that an entire class of students can go over a mock exam together, discussing the answers and identifying problems, without having to print a page.
On Monday morning, I was at the KEY Library at Precious Blood, Riruta, where the form fours were going over a mock exam in English using the smart board, and stumbled across a particularly difficult question that they then discussed as a group for nearly 10 minutes before deciding on an answer. This is the potential that a well-equipped library can have in a school.

We have been communicating with several of the KEY libraries we have donated, and are finding that at all of them, the libraries are staying open, and the students are flooding in to study, conduct revision exercises, and do mock exams in groups on the smart boards.
Though it is incredibly rewarding for us to know our KEY libraries are helping fill the gaps made as a result of this strike, we sincerely wish that more schools in Kenya were able to have well-equipped libraries such as the ones KEY donates.
Although a library is certainly no substitute for teachers, the opposite is also true. Both are worthy of investment, but ultimately, if Kenya had better-stocked libraries, this teachers' strike would not be dealing such a severe blow on the true victims - the students.
At the end of the day, every child deserves a fair chance, and libraries are crucial in providing an equal platform to all.