The population of girls in secondary schools has now surpassed that of boys breaking the age-old dominance of male students pursuing an education.
Data released by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics on Thursday shows in the last five years, girls managed to come from behind, break-even and even slightly surpass their male counterparts in enrolling for secondary education.
This comes as the number of students in secondary schools grew by eight per cent from the previous 3.2 million learners in 2019 to hit 3.5 million learners by 2020.
Out of this, 1.77 million were girls while boys enrolment stood at 1.75 million learners.
The increase in population is credited to the compulsory transition from primary to secondary schools under government for 100 per cent transition.
The report shows there were 2.7 million learners in secondary schools in 2016, the number hit 2.8 in 2017 and 2.9 in 2018.
In 2019, there was a sharp increase in enrolment pushing the numbers to an all-time high of 3.2 million learners but that was surpassed in 2020 when the population hit 3.5 million.
Primary schools on the other hand witnessed a slight increase in the number of students enrolled.
The population grew from 10.1 million learners in 2019 to 10.2 million in 2020 but boys still remain the majority enrolled.
The Star has yet to confirm what caused the decline of schools.
However, the number of public primary schools declined to 23246 from 23,286 in 2019.
Overall, the report intimates that the total number of schools in the country increased from 89,337 in 2019 to 90,145 in 2020 despite the breakout of Covid-19.
The report was released on Thursday by Treasury CS Ukur Yatani, and comes in a backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic that was forecasted to ravage the economy, however, the CS argues the contrary was witnessed.
He further said the full resumption of activities in the education sector that was almost halted for the better part of 2020, is likely to significantly boost the growth.
The number of registered pre-primary schools went up by 2.7 per cent from 28,383 to 29,148.
There were three new teacher training colleges over the same period while that of national polytechnics increased by one.
Enrolment in pre-primary 1 and 2 hit 2.8 million from 2.7 million.
TVET enrolment increased by 4.8 per cent from 430,598 in 2019 to 451,205 in 2020.
Enrolment to public and private universities increased by 7.3 per cent to stand at 546,700 from 509,500.
Those benefitting from student loans increased from 293,200 to 349,200.
-Edited by SKanyara
