The Kirinyaga county government has constructed 18 new Early Childhood Development and Education classrooms and renovated 59 others.
The classrooms built through the county’s department of education, are aimed at creating a conducive teaching and learning environment for kids.
Governor Anne Waiguru said her administration was dedicated to improving the ECDE centres across the county to enable them provide high quality education.
She said her administration has hired a new subcounty ECDE officer for Kirinyaga West as well as 10 additional ECDE teachers, bringing the number of ECDE tutors in the county to 444.
Currently, Kirinyaga has 198 ECDE centres with 18,747 pupils comprising of 9,427 boys and 9,520 girls.
The governor said the additional teachers were an effort to improve the teacher to pupil ratio.
She said additional teaching and learning materials worth around Sh10 million have also been procured and ready for distribution to the centres.
Some of the successfully implemented ECDE centre projects include Kiumbu, Mathangauta, Nyamindi, Gikumbo, Kiorugari, Kagondo, Kithiriti and Kutus.
The new classrooms have not only boosted the morale among teachers and pupils but has reflected on the performance of the young learners with notable difference in the number of the pupils transiting to primary school.
It has also seen an increase of enrolment in the centres as some parents who would previously enrol their children in private institutions are now settling for the refurbished public ones.
Margaret Karanja, a teacher at the Mathangauta ECDE centre, says before the new classrooms were put up, her pupils used to be housed in a classroom at the nearby Mathangauta secondary school, but they are now happy to have their own classroom.
She said the project has boosted the learners morale and thanked the county government for the initiative.
Before the construction of the classrooms, pupils were learning in makeshift iron sheet structures or sharing classrooms leading to overcrowding. Others were housed by secondary schools or even nearby churches.
Catherine Wanjiku, who is a Board of Management member at Kiumbu Primary School thanked Waiguru for the initiative saying it has greatly improved the quality of education and care that the learners are now getting.
She said before the intervention by the county government, the ECDE learners were accommodated in a nearby church hall, which was not conducive for learning or secure enough for them to leave their learning materials.
With the new classrooms which are furnished with child friendly modern furniture, the enrolment has now increased from 50 to 97 pupils in the PP1 class.
“Our mission is to ensure all our girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are well prepared to transit to primary school,” Waiguru said.
Early Childhood Development and Education is one of the devolved functions in the education sector.
The other is technical and vocational education and training under which the youth polytechnics fall.
-Edited by SKanyara
