Help! Dreams hang in the balance for Form One student stranded over fees in Machakos

A 14-year-old girl is pleading for educational support after she was sent home for fees a week after securing her Form One admission in at a school in Machakos.

Domitila Mumbua is yet to return to Lukenya Girls Centre of Excellence Secondary School where she had been admitted early in the year. The school is located at Kinanie within Athi River, Machakos County.

Mumbua secured a chance at the public school after she scored 346 marks in the 2023 KCPE. She sat the examinations at Ngwata Primary and Junior School in Mlolongo.

Her mother Joyce Katiku said the girl had been at home since January after she was sent home for fee only a week after her admission at the school.

“The problem is that there is no money for my daughter to return to secondary school. She didn’t even sit her first term’s examinations since she only learnt for a week and was sent home for fees,” Katiku told the Star on Monday.

The single mother of three lives with her children at a single-roomed house at Mlolongo phase three estate in Mavoko, Machakos County.

She said the girl has a brother in Form Two at St Augustine Secondary School in Mlolongo and another in PP2.

Katiku said she was finding it difficult to raise the children and educate them from her laundry ‘mama fua’ job.

She said hard economic times had made it difficult to find the menial jobs within the Mlolongo division where they reside and its environs.

The woman said she equally finds it difficult to raise Sh3,000 in house rent monthly.

She said she had paid nothing at the school given that she didn’t have even a single coin during her daughter’s admission.

Katiku said her efforts to seek help from multiple public offices and local leaders had borne no fruits.

“I just did her a small shopping for basic needs, I never paid even a single cent and she has never returned to school since then. I’m jobless, I just wash clothes for people around and I’m paid peanuts for it but it’s now down,” Katiku said.

Katiku urged well-wishers to help her raise Sh20, 368 for the girl’s first term school fees, and another Sh12, 161 for the second term. The school charges Sh8,306 for the third term.

The girl according to the fee structure seen by the Star needs about Sh160,000 to complete her four–year study at the institution.

The woman said she just talked to the school’s principal who agreed to admit the child without paying any money.

The girl’s plight came to the Star after this reporter bumped into a Mlolongo-based CBO’s WhatsApp group where members were struggling to contribute her school fees on Monday.

Four members had contributed Sh500 each by press time, a trend indicating that raising the needed amount through the platform for the child to return to school in good time could be a mirage given that lessons had long resumed.

The woman said she was also yet to pay her son’s school fees at St. Augustine. The boy’s last term’s fees are Sh7, 500, this term’s Sh8, 500. She needs to pay Sh18,000 for the boy’s school fees in a year.

Katiku’s phone number is 0700786444.