Learners to access affordable education at virtual varsity

President William Ruto yesterday said it will cost at least a quarter of fees ordinarily charged in a normal university to study at the Open University of Kenya (OUK).

Ruto said one of the major purposes of OUK is to expand access and make education at a higher level affordable.

The President has named Equity Group Holdings Chief Executive Officer James Mwangi as the OUK Chancellor, Prof Elijah Omwenga as the Acting Vice Chancellor and Prof Ezra Maritim as the Chairman of the Council.

“We have agreed with the Chancellor that we do not want it to cost half, we want it to cost a quarter and he has told me how we will do it… so I made the right choice of a Chancellor and he has given me ideas on how to make this affordable and has better ideas than I had,” said the President.

He made the remarks at Konza Technopolis when he awarded a charter to OUK.
“I was very specific when I told the Education Cabinet Secretary who the chancellor should be, and that is because this is a very important institution.

This is a bottom-up institution. It is going to give opportunities to very ordinary people…people from remote places who would not afford a university education.”

Ruto said the entire university capacity in 41 public and 37 private universities, admits 650,638 students and is still unable to keep up with the growing demand. To this end, many eligible and interested young people are every year unable to enrol for university courses.

He said his Government identified the setting up of a national open university as a critical intervention to address this crisis, with the objective being to increase access while reducing the cost of university education in order to finally deliver a 100 per cent transition to higher education.

To enhance choice and increase public university capacity, Ruto said the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) should incorporate OUK into its portal in time to enrol students for the academic year commencing in September. “It goes without saying that the students placed through KUCCPS will benefit from government financial support through the new funding model according to a combination of loans and scholarships as evaluated by the means testing instrument,” he said.

The President said he began the process of establishing OUK when he was Minister for Education and though his plan was to complete it within a year, it could not because of the circumstances then.

“I am proud we made this part of the Kenya Kwanza commitment to Kenyans. I undertook that within the first 100 days I would set up a committee that would look into bringing about OUK and I am proud that within a year, this university has opened its gates and by September, we will have students,” he said.
The President also emphasised on the need for a new funding model in institutions of higher learning, saying out of the 11,000 secondary schools in the country, 5,000 of them do not send even a single student to universities especially from the rural areas.

“Many of the children who end up in universities are those from academies and children of people who can afford a certain quality of education. Kenya cannot continue that way, we have to rethink it… that is why we made a deliberate decision that students from vulnerable families must get 100 per cent scholarship,” he said.

The inaugural courses to be offered by the university, he said, are aligned to the country’s transformational agenda and will assist in acquiring a formidable national stock of digital skills for the local market and beyond.

They include Bachelors of Cyber Security and Digital Forensics, which, going by recent events in our digital domain, must be in very high demand in the market. Others are Bachelor of Data Science, Bachelor of Technology Education, Bachelor of Science in Business and Entrepreneurship and Statistics and Bachelor of Science in Agriculture and Food Systems.

The University also offers postgraduate diplomas in Leadership and Accountability as well as Learning design and Technology.

“I have been assured that in coming years, masters and doctorate programmes will be introduced, making lifelong learning not only possible, but also accessible and affordable,” he said.

According to the President, adoption of best practices, technologies and teaching tools at the OUK will guarantee effective curriculum implementation, quality education and training and also set the pace for higher education in Kenya to transform teaching and learning.

He said the conversation surrounding sharing resources and positions has gone on for too long but should specifically centre on how to ‘bake a bigger cake’.

This, he explained, starts with arming everybody with the right education, giving everybody a chance to acquire knowledge and being empowered to make meaningful contribution.

He said this is the reason why the Government allocated the largest ever budget in education and was a deliberate move to invest over Sh650 billion from this year going forward to equip everyone with skills, expertise and competencies.

So far, Ruto said at least Sh100 billion has been spent to develop Konza to its current level, with the power generation facility alone costing Sh7.9 billion.

“The Government has spent huge resource because Konza technopolis is a national infrastructure and a global outfit and will serve all Kenyans. In fact, we have negotiated a big facility that will bring the entire digital infrastructure of Kenya into this facility,” he said.

Prime Cabinet Secretary, Musalia Mudavadi who was also in attendance called for the need to foster an environment of peace and create stability and give Kenyans an opportunity to grow.

He noted that the Government has had to take tough measures to transform all sectors of the economy, which are now beginning to see a lot of light at the end of the tunnel.

“Technology is one of the key pillars, it is driving universities and has opened the door where the reservoir of knowledge has been broadened, literally, overnight to millions of Kenyans. If we work together that reservoir of education will never dry,” he said.