Subject Area:
Social Sciences and Humanities
Abstract:
Early Childhood Development Education (ECDE)
globally and Kenya in particular has been recognized as a crucial
programme that lays a foundation for a child’s holistic and integrated
education that meets the cognitive, social, moral, spiritual, emotional,
physical and developmental needs. The purpose of this paper is to
analyze the current issues facing ECDE in Kenya. Currently, ECDE is
under the care of parents, community, non-governmental organizations
(NGO), religious organizations and other private providers (MOEST,
2005). This paper is based on the premise as stipulated in the United
Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
declaration on Education for All (EFA) by 2015. Early Childhood
Development Education being the first formal agent of socialization
(Kibera & Kimokoti, 2007) calls the attention of all stakeholders to
critically address the challenges related to issues of access, equity,
quality and relevance of ECDE programmes. However, the private sector
seems to have monopolized most of the ECDE centers compared to the
government. Thus, the public education sector opportunities for ECDE are
lacking, yet available data shows that at later formal education i.e
primary schools, public education cater for well over 90% of Kenya’s
school going age. This paper therefore puts into question why the public
education sector is missing out in this very important domain of
education in its children at this tender age. To address the
aforementioned issues, this paper is guided by the following research
questions: What are the current challenges facing ECDE? What are the
short and long term implications to the educational formation of the
learners? How can this situation be improved? Literature informing this
paper has been sourced from a content analysis approach of various
documents from library search, online sources and Ministry of Education-
Kenya documents i.e. Sessional Papers. Initial findings show that ECDE
is currently facing challenges related to the following: funding, policy
formulation, low participation rates of target age groups including
special learners, lack of curriculum content informed by research based
data, inadequate qualified educators, lack of schemes of service for
educators, rising number of orphans, conflict in medium of instruction
among others. Further, of importance to note is that authors of this
paper also feel that lack of practical approaches to inform the parents
and lack of the Ministry of Education’s funding and implementation
initiatives further complicates the provision of ECDE. Following an
analysis of the current scenario in ECDE, the authors recommend MOE
reform programmes should be informed by systematic policy research and
analyses informed by research, inclusion in terms gender, social
economic status (SES) among others. Further, educational policy makers
and managers should be educationists with reputable professional and
experience records
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