4.3.3 Focus on orphans, poor and
vulnerable children
Another motivation stated by the school owners for setting up
their schools in Kibera has to do with the empathy and concern for the poorest,
orphans and vulnerable children. They wanted to offer the opportunity to
orphans and vulnerable children who could not afford to be educated in their
institutions. In stressing on the importance of this trend, some of school
owners reported that:
«The area has two developed academies which targets
pupil from relatively rich families who are able to pay the high rates of
school fees they charge. This led us to start up this school to cater for
children who were not able to enrol into public schools and other academies for
one reason or the other. In fact we wanted to give orphans and vulnerable
children the opportunity to have access to education.»(School owner B. St
Stephen Children Centre & school)
And,
«I was so much concerned with the fate of orphans,
destitute and neglected children. As a Christian, I felt so bad when I use to
see them around. I first started teaching them in my house and seeing that the
number was increasing, the community and some members of the church helped me
to set up a school for this particular group of children.» (School owner F
(Support Orphans and Destitute Academy)
These factors are extremely important in understanding the
investment phenomenon taking place in many developing countries. In this case,
the mushrooming of private schools catering for the poor and the needier in the
slum of Kibera is partly attributed to the huge number of less educated
children living in the community.
4.3.4 Profit motive
The school owners that took part
in the research acknowledge charging fees to their pupils for many purposes.
Some of these costs are either allocated for uniforms, text books or
examination fees. Although not every school applies this fee scheme for all the
pupils' expenses, it is however worth noting that all of the 20 schools in this
study charge a registration fee. The monthly fees for children in the research
schools range from £3.97 to £13.49 (see figure 6). These fees are for
many of the school owners, the principal financial income of their schools and
are used in covering the expenses related to the functioning of the business.
The main costs for the school owners are teacher salaries.
Figure 6 Monthly fees
Although it has been noted that all these schools charge fees
on business principles for their effective functioning, our study has brought
forward the fact that, a good number of these schools, if not all of them,
equally offer considerable support in the form of scholarships to the needier
pupils. We specifically laid an emphasis on this issue while setting the
questions to school owners. It was found that close to a relatively high
proportion of the schools do offer scholarship to two categories of pupils.
This form of support accounted for up to 65% of scholarships awarded for
orphans and 25% for outstanding children (tables 5 and 6). Not absolutely
refuting the fact that they make some money out of their investments, many of
the school owners however do emphasise that their investment aimed first and
foremost, at covering the educational needs of the population in which they
themselves live. Offering assistance to such students contribute to make the
awarding institution a valuable one and thus motivate many other pupils and
parents to cast their choice on it for future enrolments. This could be seen as
a marketing policy taking place in a competitive business arena.
Table 5: The school offers
scholarships for orphans
Table 6: The school offers scholarships for
outstanding students
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