More than 4,000 students at Mount Kenya University received fee waivers totaling Sh80 million.
According to university chairman Simon Gicharu, individuals who were permitted to attend classes during the Covid-19 outbreak and then graduated but never picked up their diplomas because of a shortage of funds are the benefactors.
The Covid-19 pandemic made the uncollected certificate problem worse. I would like to formally announce the cancellation of all of these fines on behalf of the board of directors.
All former students can now come and pick up their certificates without having to pay anything, according to Gicharu, who founded the university. “We have written off the Sh80 million,” he added.
Gicharu made the comments yesterday in Thika at the university’s 23rd commencement ceremony.
He stated that the university will support educational reforms and added that the changes would boost university international rankings, promote productivity in research and innovation, and exempt universities from scholarly research and innovation fees.
The task force report, written under the direction of Prof. Raphael Munavu, and delivered to President William Ruto on Tuesday, contains the revisions. A wide range of proposals in the report are aimed at changing the educational system from the pre-primary to the tertiary levels.
The implementation of a system fashioned after the National Youth Service pre-university, a programme that failed in the 1980s, is one of the main recommendations.
In order to entrench community-based learning, the proposed initiative will make community service mandatory for senior school graduates for three months and for another nine months after university education is completed.
Universities will also be required to create one-year retraining programmes for teachers in order to prepare them for competency-based programmes for teacher education.
Karim Khan, an ICC prosecutor, received an honorary doctorate of law during the commencement ceremony in recognition of his work in the fight against terrorism, community service, and expertise in international criminal law and human rights.
The primary guest, Moses Wetang’ula, Speaker of the National Assembly, allayed concerns that the education reforms will have an impact on private institutions.
