The "Kenya Prisons Andragogy and Pedagogy Project" started as a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme of the . Led by the dean of the School of Education, faculty from the School has been volunteering to empower inmates who act as teachers to fellow inmates. At the time of their incarceration, inmates had no teaching skills to handle formal lessons in the prison classes. The objective of this project is to empower these inmate teachers with andragogy and pedagogy skills.
In the maximum-security prisons in Kenya, there are inmates who were incarcerated while they were at various levels in their academics. There are those who are at the primary level, others are at the secondary level while others were incarcerated while at the tertiary level. There are those who have progressed from primary, to secondary and on to tertiary level. Our project is currently concentrating on empowering inmate teachers so that they produce students with better grades who can progress to higher levels of education.
UNAI SDG10: REDUCED INEQUALITIES POSITION
Kenya Prisons Service (KPS) falls under the Ministry of Interior and the National Administration and not the Ministry of Education thus in 2017 it was not receiving trained teachers to teach in the prison services. To support the prisons department in terms of empowering inmates and reducing the academic gap and inequalities, the Mount Kenya University (MKU), the United Nations Academic Impact SDG Hub 10: Reduced Inequalities, is actively engaged in an initiative where faculty are being organized to walk into the prisons facilities at designated times and train the inmate teachers on pedagogy and andragogy.
The project started with Naivasha maximum security prison and has now extended into other five maximum-security prisons namely Kamiti in Nairobi, King’ong’o in Nyeri, Lang’ata women maximum-security prison in Nairobi, and Kodiaga in Kisumu and Shimo-la-Tewa in Mombasa. The joined the initiative by providing support to buy resources for use in the prison education. KNATCOM-UNESCO has a budget of Ksh. 500,000 every year that supports the project in the maximum-security prisons. This initiative has been active for the last three years with a promise of continuing. We appreciate the KNATCOM support but also acknowledge the fact that with more support, we could scale up the initiative to other maximum prisons and other medium prisons for more impact and wider coverage. “I am glad MKU came up with this idea of empowering inmate teachers with teaching skills. It has really improved our results”, said one of the officers at the Naivasha Inmate Education Center.
The Naivasha maximum security prisons have a student population of 1571 inmates and 75 inmate teachers are involved in the project. After moving to other prisons, the faculty trained another 95 more inmate teachers at Kamiti Maximum Security prison in Nairobi which has a student population of 1683. The next prison where inmate teachers will be empowered is Lang’ata women maximum-security prison. We anticipate training another 83 inmate teachers to support a student population of 1307 women inmate students. The essence of training inmate teachers is because a trained teacher produces better results. Because of limited resources, the MKU faculty trains inmates one prison at a time. Once we empower inmate teachers and we establish quality teaching and learning is going on in the chosen prison, we move to the next.
The project has had an impact because from the time the project begun, there has been notable improvement in the national examination results. Many students have progressed from primary to secondary school while others have attained results at Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) good enough to enable them join degree courses at the Kenyan universities. Notable cases are one who is pursuing a degree in medicine and surgery at a Kenyan University while another one is pursuing an engineering degree course in yet another university in Kenya. “Courtesy of the opportunity to learn at the prison when I was serving my jail term, I was able to perform well in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) which enabled me get a presidential clemency to undertake my course at the university”, said a former inmate who is pursuing a degree course at a Kenyan University.
Reaching out to inmates has helped and continues to empower inmates in general and ensures that those who qualify to join degree courses are supported to do so. Those who can join the universities are given presidential clemency to join university courses even without completing their jail terms. This helps in decongesting the overpopulated prisons. It also reduces recidivism, according to studies, a formally educated inmate has 48% chances of not relapsing as compared to an inmate who is not formally educated while in prison.
There is a developing plan to offer Mount Kenya University degrees to inmates who are qualified to undertake them should funding be available. Funding is necessary to pay for the tuition fees of the inmates. We will use MKU faculty to lecture on scheduled sessions and provide the Mr. Signal Learning Base (MSLB), an educational technology. The technology provides learning resources while ensuring no direct internet connectivity to inmates (due to security reason). Once this is achieved, there will be inmates who will leave the prison after their jail term completely empowered with university degrees and ready to get into the world of work. The years spent in prison will not be “wasted” but will be “properly utilized” to empower them academically. This is an ongoing project.
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