The Kenya Private School Association (KPSA) recently came into an agreement with the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) in a Sh60 billion deal that will see the latter provide digital learning devices to several private primary schools.
In the deal, JKUAT will be expected to manufacture about four million devices in the next three years at the fixed price of Sh15, 000 per device. The association then plans on distributing the devices countrywide to over 11, 000 private schools, which will ensure that more than 1.8million students benefit from the project.
The deal will now incorporate the private primary schools that were going to miss out on the advantage of the Digital Learning Programme that was implemented by the Government last year to help learners to integrate digital technologies in learning. According to Information Communication Technology (ICT) Cabinet secretary, Joe Mucheru, the programme had already supplied laptops to 7,238 public primary schools in 21 counties.
The association looks to adopt the plan of the digital learning programme which ensured that every grade one student got a Windows based tablet loaded with the officially approved learning material while the teacher got a laptop to control the devices in the classroom. The only difference would be that the association plans on doing it in all the grades.
Mutheu Kasanga, the chairperson of the Kenya Private School Association said, “We are not just having digital literacy for class one pupils; we are having it in all the classes from class one to class eight.”
Apart from this, the association has also gone a stretch further by entering into negotiations with the Government and several local banks in order to create a Sh800 million fund that will assist the private schools to borrow and sustain the programme.
