Investigating Private Pre-schooling in Nairobi: Links between Cost, Equity, and Quality

• In Event: Public and private early childhood education in sub-Saharan Africa

Proposal

The demand for early childhood education (ECE) services is growing across Sub-Saharan Africa. In Kenya, gross enrollment at the pre-primary level increased from 47% in 2008 to 76% in 2016 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2018). In Kenya, it is estimated that nationwide over one-third of these students are enrolled in private institutions, a nearly four-fold increase from the 10 percent of children enrolled in private pre-schools in 2000 (World Bank 2016). These private enrollments are particularly consolidated within highly populous urban areas. A 2014 study in Nairobi by the UBS Optimus Foundation found that nearly 85% of all ECE enrollments in the Mukuru slum were in private pre-schools.

In 2016, Nairobi City Council launched an ambitious ECE reform program focusing on early childhood education (ECE). This presentation summarizes findings from a market scoping study performed in preparation for the rollout of the program. It offers overall findings and general trends regarding the pre-primary education market in Nairobi. The research involved data collection across a number of Nairobi’s administrative wards, stratified according to level of affluence, with categories labelled wealthy, middle, poor, and very poor, with a total of six wards being selected for inclusion in the study: Mountain View, Kilimani, California, Dandora Phase III, Githurai, and Kiamaiko. The aim was to identify a range of private schools that would represent the heterogeneity of non-state provision within Nairobi.

Following the selection of wards, the study consisted of two key phases of work: (i) an initial census mapping of all public and private pre-schools within the selected wards; and (ii) administration of school-level surveys and a classroom observation instrument to a randomly-selected subset of the mapped schools. Every preschool within these six randomly-selected wards was identified and geo-mapped (this includes all formal and non-formal, registered and unregistered, public and private, attached and unattached preschools). In total, 96 private schools were randomly selected to take part in a detailed interview and observation protocol, collecting data from teachers, head teachers, and through observations of the school premises and classroom activities.

I present a range of findings from the private ECE sector, including: (i) the basic characteristics of private pre-schools (e.g., number of students, class sizes, gender distribution, etc.); (ii) the share of enrollment across provider types (for-profits, non-profits, churches, communities, chains vs. single-operation, registered vs unregistered, etc); (iii) the costs of private ECE attendance; (iv) variation in school quality between private providers, and (v) the relationship between school costs and school quality (e.g., are high-quality private ECE centers accessible to the poorest?).

Author

• Donald R. Baum, Brigham Young University