Kenya is close to achieving gender parity in national primary school examinations, Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu has said.
The gap between the number of boys who sat the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exam this year compared to girls narrowed, he said.
Speaking while releasing the results at Mitihani House on Thursday, Machogu said the gender gap was almost bridged.
"In the 2023 KCPE exam, gender parity shifted in favour of males at 51.30 per cent and females at 48.70 per cent," he said.
According to the data, out of the 1,406,557 candidates who sat the exam, 685,017 (48.7 per cent) were girls while 721, 544 (51.30 per cent) were boys.
This is an improvement compared to the 881,416 candidates who sat the examinations in 2022, where 443,644 were male while 437,772 were female, translating to 50.33 per cent and 49. 69 per cent gender representation respectively.
In this year's KCPE exams, the government allowed 205 candidates to sit the exams without prior registration. They included 125 boys and 80 girls.
Six counties had a higher entry for female candidates than male candidates: Isiolo, Narok, Nairobi, Tana River, Marsabit and Kisumu.
Isiolo county recorded the highest entry of more female than male candidates with 51.75 per cent females against 48.25 per cent male entries.
CS Machogu further revealed that the highest number of candidates in the KCPE examination (1,023,859) were in the appropriate age bracket of 13-15 years, equivalent to 72.31 per cent of the total candidature.
Machogu said this trend has been observed over the last five years.
The counties that had the highest percentages of candidates who were 18 years and above were Garissa (25.86 per cent), Turkana (24.50 per cent), Kwale (16.09 per cent), Kilifi (15.66 ) and Mandera (33.90 per cent)
