When the Kenyan government retired the 8–4–4 system of education, the official justification was that the model had become too theoretical and excessively competitive. High-stakes national examinations, the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) and the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE), were roundly blamed for burdening young pupils with textbooks, learner anxiety, rote memorisation, and what was derided as a narrow definition of success — too much focus on professional, white collar careers.

In its place, the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC), now rebranded as the Competency-Based Education (CBE) system, was introduced in 2017 during the administration of President Uhuru Kenyatta with the promise of a learner-centred, flexible, and stress-free education, with pathways that promised opportunity for everyone.

Almost a decade into implementation, however, that promise has collapsed under the weight of reality, and controversy has once again exploded over the new curriculum. The new system has increased costs, transferred homework to parents, confused teachers, strained school infrastructure, and widened, not narrowed, educational inequality.

In the process, the CBE is beset with problem of poor implementation, a possible sabotage of rigor, the undermining of certain careers, and declining competitiveness among the leaners. By demonising competitiveness, we risk dismantling the very engine that produces excellence in education and, ultimately, in the economy.

Reform, Not Reinvention, Is all that Was Needed

The central error in the transition from 8–4–4 to CBC was neither moral nor pedagogical alone; it was economic and logical. The 8–4–4 system was not inherently defective. Its principal weakness lay in chronic underinvestment, particularly in practical facilities such as laboratories, workshops, libraries, and teacher capacity building. Government policy documents from as far back as the Kamunge Commission (1985) and Koech Commission (1999) identified these gaps, yet successive administrations failed to address them adequately.

It would have been significantly cheaper, and educationally safer, to repair these deficiencies than to dismantle the entire system. Instead, the Ministry of Education opted for a wholesale curricular reset, introducing a complex framework that required new infrastructure, new articulation re-rearrangement, new teacher retraining, new assessment regimes, new learning materials, and continuous parental involvement, all without first solving the challenge of instructional infrastructure. It was, in effect, a decision to burn down the house because the plumbing leaked.

A Curriculum Built for Inequality

CBC is, by design, a resource-intensive curriculum. Its emphasis on projects, one-on-one instruction, continuous assessment, co-curricular activities, and digital literacy assumes the existence of well-equipped smart classrooms, trained teachers, reliable electricity, internet access, libraries, laboratories, and safe play spaces. Yet official data from the Ministry of Education and the Auditor-General has consistently shown that thousands of public primary and secondary schools, especially in rural and arid counties, lack basic infrastructure, including adequate classrooms and even sanitation facilities. Some schools in some part of the country have what has been described as “air-conditioned classrooms,” meaning open-air classes conducted under trees.

According to government school mapping and audit reports, many rural schools operate with overcrowded classrooms, understaffed faculties, and minimal instructional materials. By introducing a curriculum that depends on resources these schools do not have, the state has entrenched inequality rather than reduced it. True, urban private and national schools can approximate the CBC ideal; rural public schools cannot. The result is a two-tier education system, where competence is cultivated for the wealthy while the poor receive a diluted version of the same curriculum.

Compounding these challenges further is the fact that after spending resources building junior high school facilities in senior high schools, the junior high school classes were located in primary schools where such facilities do not exist. Junior school students are taught by primary school teachers, who despite doing their best, often do not have the requisite subject-matter expertise in some of the subjects, or are too focused on their core classes of responsibility — lower primary. Meanwhile, it is noteworthy that diploma and degree graduate teachers posted to teach in junior secondary classes are already specialised narrowly in two or three subjects, meaning that a large number of subjects in the new curriculum do not have qualified teachers. In such cases, junior high instruction is relying on P1 teachers whose college curriculum is arguably broader but focused on teaching lower primary curriculum. The result is a scholarly tower of Babel in which primary school teachers feel misused, junior high teachers feel misplaced, parents feel overwhelmed, and feel students confused.

Parental Burden as Policy

One of the most persistent complaints since CBC’s rollout has been the offloading of instructional responsibility onto parents. Continuous assessment tasks routinely require parental supervision, access to a wide range of materials, printing, and, in many cases, internet connectivity. Parents complain of arriving home at night to find their children demanding materials that are impossible to access at night, then having to do the homework themselves. Parliamentary committee hearings and public forums have repeatedly heard testimony from parents who report rising education humongous official and below-the-line costs despite the promise of “free basic education.”

This shift is not accidental; it is structural. CBC assumes a middle-class household with time, literacy, and disposable income. It is as if the drafters of the curriculum spent too much time in Scandinavian states with high standards of living and great happiness index. In a country where a significant proportion of households rely on informal labour and subsistence livelihoods, this assumption borders on policy negligence.

Manufactured Consensus and Silenced Dissent

To sustain this experiment, the state orchestrated a tightly controlled narrative. Right from when CBC was introduced, alternative views were outrightly discouraged. Prominent academics, education consultants, and school administrators were enlisted to publicly endorse CBC through a firehose of praises, often through op-eds and policy forums that left little room for dissent. Teachers’ unions, classroom practitioners, and parents who raised concerns were dismissed as reactionary, ill-informed or resistant to change.

This manufactured consensus was particularly troubling given that meaningful public participation, as required under the Constitution, occurred late and reluctantly. By the time stakeholder forums were convened, key decisions had already been made. Even so, reactions were ad hoc, disjointed, irrational and often populist, as the case of placing junior high in primary schools indicate. It is trite but true to say that CBC was not adopted through national consensus; it was imposed through enforced bureaucratic momentum.

Education Should Liberate, Not Channel Into Narrow Paths

The introduction of “pathways” at Senior School has been marketed as a revolutionary innovation. In reality, it is a repackaging of an old idea. The A-Level system that preceded 8–4–4 already offered subject combinations that effectively functioned as career tracks. What history has shown, both in Kenya and elsewhere, is that early academic tracking locks learners into life-long trajectories based on exuberant but indiscrete adolescent decisions. Having gone through the A-Level system, I know not a single person in my cohort who changed from the careers earmarked by their subject combinations (the pathways of the time) to another career suggested by a subject combination they had not pursued.

The architects of CBC ignored a basic psychological reality: young people change their minds all the time, which is a good thing since common wisdom says that only a fool does not change his mind. Interests evolve as learners come by new information. Talents emerge late. Fads change as maturity sets in, and learners become aware that all pathways are not the same. A rigid pathway system narrows opportunity prematurely, particularly for learners who are late bloomers, discover interdisciplinary strengths or have unconventional ambitions. The argument that pathways are flexible is wishful thinking in a rigid country where hiring decisions, licensing, admissions into professional bodies, and even teaching in colleges and universities has been erroneously tied to high school and subsequent specializations.

At the level of basic education, the curriculum should be broad, exploratory, and intellectually demanding. In classical terms, it should be liberal, designed to free the mind rather than funnel it. As Fareed Zakaria observed in his book: IN DEFENSE OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION,

“A liberal education gives you the tools to learn how to learn. It teaches you how to process information, how to analyze data, and how to write clearly and express yourself — skills that are useful no matter what you do.”

The Pathways, by definition, narrow knowledge into compartments and silos. They restrict the freedom of a 13-year-old to explore, to the fullest extent possible in the curriculum at that level, the intersection of science and the humanities, art and engineering, history and biology. As Howard Gardner, author of A DISCLIPLINED MIND: WHAT ALL STUDENTS SHOULD UNDERSTAND, has noted:

“The purpose of education is to help people to understand the world, and to want to help to make it a better place. A broad education allows an individual to see the world through the lenses of the scientist, the historian, the artist, and the philosopher.”

It follows, therefore, that specialisation should follow generalisation, not precede it. By introducing specialization too early, CBC inverts this logic.

Lessons from High-Performing Economies

Kenya’s policymakers would do well to study the education strategies of the so-called Asian Tigers; South Korea, Singapore, China, and Malaysia. These countries did not build world-class economies by lowering academic standards or avoiding competition; in fact, their education systems are the most competitive in the world, although, having been lulled by recent economic success, the systems are being reformed to incorporate the so-called “21st century soft skills” through the Free Semester System (Jayu-haggi). But it must not be overlooked that South Korea and other Tigers got where they are because of the rigour of their education systems. They invested heavily in teacher quality, infrastructure, literally killed their children with heavy curricula and rigorous assessments, and a culture that treats education as a national priority.

While extreme academic pressure carries real mental-health risks for some children, and should never be romanticised, the underlying principle remains valid: hard work, discipline, a broad education, and meritocratic competition are powerful engines of social mobility. Kenya’s current trajectory replaces this ethic with ambiguity, narrowness, diluted standards, pedagogical confusion, and the privileging of decisions of immature minds. It is an unfortunate disregard of education theory that states clearly that different people mature intellectually at different times, including Carol Dweck’s Incremental Theory of Intelligence and Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), and a sorry state of letting the blind lead, for it is irresponsible to allow a mere child to make life-defining choices.

The graduates of the A-Level and 8–4–4 systems populate global universities, multinational corporations, research institutions, and international civil service. They succeeded not because the system was gentle and palliative, but because it was demanding. They were trained to compete, to fail and recover, to master content deeply, and to perform under pressure. That experience prepared them for a globalised world that is competitive, and is neither kind nor forgiving. The world is a competitive place and nations are in cutthroat competition. Kenya’s education system should aim at training an army of supple academic toughies, not flabby, one-directional sissies who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

Kenya does not need a curriculum that punishes rural schools, restricts the curriculum, herds pupils into technical courses while disregarding soft skills, burdens parents, and forces children into premature career decisions. It needs rigorous, broad, exploratory, divergent, competitive, well-resourced basic education that equalizes all Kenyan children and offers equal opportunity to all of them. Education policy should be built on evidence, not ideology. Children are not Guinea pigs. The cost of unnecessary experimentation is too high, for individuals, for the economy, and for the nation. It is time to take another look at this experiment and restore a culture of academic seriousness that has historically built strong societies and competitive nations.

Kenya’s CBC Is An Education Experiment In Need of Re-thinking was originally published in Age of Awareness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For the past two years, Kenya’s halls of academia have been gripped by a peculiar and deeply flawed ritual of verifying staff academic certificates.

Unfortunately, what began as a legitimate state crackdown on fake academic credentials has morphed into a masterclass in how noble intentions can be strangled by bureaucratic absurdity, creating a system that is not just redundant but actively self-defeating.

The timeline of this frenzy is a matter of public record. It began earnestly enough in February 2024, when the Public Service Commission (PSC), after an internal audit, handed a report on suspected certificate forgeries to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI). By October, the EACC was publicizing arrests, naturally framing its actions as a necessary defense of public resources.

The momentum built through 2025: the Kenya National Qualifications Authority (KNQA) flagged “thousands” of suspect credentials, a multi-agency task force was formed under the Office of the President, and the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) intensified its own vetting of teacher qualifications. This drive culminated in a nationwide re-verification order in May 2025, aiming to recover nearly half a billion shillings reportedly lost to fraudulent salaries, with universities explicitly named as a key battleground.

An Impeachable and Unassailable Process

On the surface, this escalating sequence of actions is unimpeachable and unassailable. Ensuring that college lecturers are qualified is the bare minimum that any society should demand. However, the method universities have chosen to comply with this state directive is so fundamentally ill-conceived that it threatens to achieve the exact opposite of its stated goal.

The core failure is a breathtaking violation of a basic principle of forensic investigation: never entrust the suspect with the inquiry. While agencies like the EACC have the capacity to pursue specific criminal probes, including anyone suspected of providing fake papers, and bodies like the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC), and even some universities, have laudably launched digital verification platforms, the on-the-ground reality for faculty is simply bizarre.

For starters, the plethora of online verification databases being built and commissioned cannot talk to one another. None of the verification platforms built by universities and colleges can shake hands with the KNEC or KNQA platforms to verify or authenticate a document. In this whole mess, the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing.

Instead of using cutting-edge technology that can compare uttered documents with originals and identify a forgery, employers are relying on wood and rubber ink stamps, a system of authentication that is as old as printing technology. Needless to mention, the processes at the KNEC are evidently manual, despite all the talk about digitisation.

However, the most egregious practice in this whole exercise is placing the onus on the employee — the very individual under suspicion — to return to their former primary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities to have their old certificates stamped and signed by the relevant authorities. This stamp “evidence” is then submitted as proof of authenticity.

Forcing Staff to do their Background Checks

This inverted process makes a mockery of established standards in both credentialing and background checking. Nowhere else in the world, other than what is currently being witnessed in Kenya, are applicants or subjects asked to do their own background checks. What ensues is a system built on a foundation of profound naivety or, more cynically, deliberate malfeasance.

A stamp and signature are among the easiest things to forge or acquire through illicit means. An employee with a fake certificate could simply bribe an official at an institution to legitimize it with the required stamp, effectively laundering the forgery through an official channel. Astonishingly, there appears to be no plans for subsequent, independent counter-verification by the employer by contacting these institutions directly — or they would have done so in the first instance! The flawed process begins and ends with the employee.

This creates a dangerous loophole that renders the government directive perfunctory and performative. It also offers those who may have initially “uttered” false documents a golden opportunity to “solidify” their forgeries under the cover of a chaotic, nationwide exercise. The purge, therefore, ceases to be a cleansing, as was expected, and risks becoming a convoluted mass amnesty — a chance to cement fraudulent credentials in place.

In the meantime, the collateral damage is significant. Esteemed elderly faculty members, who have dedicated decades to teaching and research, are forced to embark on futile pilgrimages to primary schools they attended over half a century ago, begging for stamps to prove their long-established identities. Even those who have excelled in their professional and academic careers, including publishing, research, and praxis, must prove once again that they went to school. The stamp is more important than proven scholarship.

This trawling exercise is not just an act of collective punishment and indignity; it is a catastrophic waste of valuable teaching and research time that disrupts academic calendars in the middle of terms and demoralises a whole profession.

Bureaucratic incompetence or a designed failure?

The motivations behind such a clearly self-defeating policy invite skepticism. Is this a case of mere bureaucratic incompetence, or a designed failure? The latter seems plausible. The manual process, even where it involves elaborate online submission of photocopies of the same physical certificates being suspected, functions as a revenue-generating scheme for institutions charging “facilitation or service fees.” Somewhere along the pipeline, lawyers may also benefit from notarizing documents — an act often confused with verification but which is merely an attestation that a signature was signed in their presence, not that the document is genuine.

There is a simpler, streamlined, and globally accepted method to resolve this issue. The solution is not to harass employees but to empower human resources departments to act on the state’s directive correctly. Universities, possibly coordinated by the Commission for University Education (CUE), should quietly and directly contact the institutions listed on their staff’s CVs ( each employee working in a Kenyan university once submitted 10 copies of their detailed application, including certificates).

A simple, confidential email or query through KNEC’s new portal asking if an individual identified with an admission number sat for a particular exam in a particular year in a given school should suffice. At the college level, a question could be posed: Did this person graduate in this year with this diploma or degree? A positive response will close the matter. A negative response is then forwarded to the EACC and DCI, who are already primed for action. It is that straightforward, cheap, and effective.

Given that KNEC, as the sole national examiner, will be overwhelmed with inquiries, it could consider providing access (through institutional subscriptions so that KNEC can make more money) to its databases to bona fide and accredited HR professionals working in departments of employers who are seeking the verification of academic documents.

Passing the Cost of Verification to staff

What is unfolding in Kenya is more than just an administrative blunder. It exposes a troubling preference for bureaucratic spectacle over tangible integrity. By outsourcing verification to the same person being verified, the system protects the potentially guilty, harasses the innocent, and wastes precious national resources. It is a farcical exercise that verifies nothing but its own profound uselessness.

The only spec of genius in all this is cost-saving. The employer is certainly not incurring any costs, as it is the employees who will drive to all the schools and colleges they attended, deal with demoralized headteachers and other staff, make follow-up calls, print, photocopy, and deliver copies of the stamped documents. This is called pushing the cost to the verified.

Of course, in the context of high unemployment, university dons have no choice but to do what they are told to do — visit the schools they once attended and grovel for (and hopefully not monetarily induce) registrars to motivate them to go to their dusty archives and search for the required evidence.

But is this the right thing? For the sake of Kenyan education, asking suspects to verify their own academic certificates must be scrapped and replaced with a silent, efficient, and objective standard led by the employer without involving the employee.

~Ends~