By Vivienne Russell | 15 July 2013
Education and healthcare provision in Kenya remains far from optimal and the government must do more to measure the performance of public services, the World Bank has said.
The bank has used a number of Service Delivery Indicators (SDIs), based on independent surveys of 5,000 teachers and health providers, to provide an overview of how services were developing. Kenya is the first country to work with the World Bank to implement the SDI regime, following successful pilots in Tanzania and Senegal.
Kenya was praised for making ‘tremendous progress’ in reducing child mortality and getting more children into school, but the bank said more action was needed to build on these gains.
Mwangi Kimenyi, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of the Africa Growth Initiative, said some ‘very deliberate improvements’ were necessary.
‘We can only achieve widely shared prosperity in future if all Kenyans have access to high-quality education and healthcare, and can take advantage of the economic opportunities coming their way,’ he said.
Among the World Bank’s findings were that public school teachers spent less time in classrooms teaching than those working in private schools. This resulted in public school children receiving up to 20 days less teaching time per term. Only a third (35%) of teachers demonstrated a mastery of their subject.
In terms of public health, the bank found that almost a third (29%) of health providers were absent, with the majority of this absence sanctioned by management.
There were also concerns about the knowledge and skills of health professionals, with only 58% able to diagnoses four out of five common conditions, such as diarrhoea or malaria. When it came to managing maternal and neonatal complications, fewer than half the correct treatment actions were taken.
Ritva Reinikka, director of human development, Africa, at the World Bank, said the SDI data had raised several ‘red flags on systemic and management issues’.
She added: ‘The point is that you can manage better if you measure your performance regularly. The Kenyan government can now use these findings to track the impact of results-oriented reforms and polices across time and citizens can use them to push for better results.’
The bank said it was excited about the potential to use SDIs in other African countries.
