The North Rift has the highest number of adolescents who have never attended school.
The latest Kenya Adolescent Health Survey released by the Ministry of Health shows 59 per cent of respondents said they had never attended school.
The study was conducted between December 2019 and January 2020 in 44 counties in Kenya among 380 schools.
The data collection tools included questionnaires that were administered electronically using Survey CTO software.
The survey shows the region similarly has the lowest school enrollment rate at 35 per cent followed by North Eastern at 59 per cent, compared to the national enrolment rate of 87 per cent.
“Majority (77 per cent) of the respondents with primary school level were able to read a whole sentence, except North Eastern who had only 27 per cent being able to read a whole sentence followed by Rift Valley North at 51 per cent,” the report says.
Nationally, most of the respondents missed school for a period of 1- 5 days except for North Eastern where majority missed school for more than five days with the highest levels of absenteeism being in rural areas.
Those who had missed school cited sickness and lack of money as the main at 67 and 17 per cent respectively.
The report shows that in the North Rift region, however, majority of the respondents indicated that the schools were far away.
Other reasons cited for missing school were having a child or being pregnant which was highly recorded in Nairobi and Western while another five per cent of respondents in Western said they missed school since they had to work.
The report calls for implementation and enforcement of the existing policies and laws protecting children’s rights to education especially from child labour as well as support for the return to school policy especially for girls faced with teenage pregnancy.
The report further calls on stakeholders to develop appropriate curriculum and materials to be used in monitoring literacy at each level in primary schools.
