Technical institutions are important in preparing entrepreneurs for sectors like manufacturing. Therefore it’s important to address the low enrollment of Kenyan women in the said institutions.
The Education secretary, Fred Matiang’i, revealed that in the face of surging demand for technical expertise, 78 per cent of students going to university preferred to study arts and humanities, with only 22 per cent taking science, technology, engineering and mathematics-related courses.
This is not what one would expect of a nation that aspires to become a newly-industrialising middle income country as espoused in Vision 2030 economic blueprint.
The envisioned status could be achieved through creating a globally competitive and adaptive human resource base to meet the requirements of a rapidly industrialising economy.
In addition to the low enrolment in these courses at our institutions, students’ performance in these technical fields have not been encouraging either.
An even sad reality is that even among the minority of students who pursue technical training after completing secondary education, a very small percentage are females. Even among the females, an even smaller percentage are drawn from disadvantaged backgrounds and marginalised regions of the country.
Thus, the country continues to grapple with the challenge of providing more educational opportunities for girls at all levels from primary to tertiary and university.
Promoting the education or training Kenyan girls and Kenyan women in the fields of science, technology and mathematics has not received the scale of attention needed among players in the training sector.
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However, in the recent past, progress has been made to improve the enrolment rates among females in post-secondary education institutions, particularly those pursuing technical courses.
But despite the steady increases, the figures are still low, and extra efforts need to be made to remove the gender disparity at this level of education and specialties.
For instance, the National Industrial Training Authority (NITA), concerned by the low number of Kenyan women in technical careers in industry, set out to try and reorient the attitude of females through a sponsorship programme that is in its tenth year today. Through the programme, 25 females are selected each year for full scholarship to undertake technical training at diploma or craft certificate level.
