Lobby demands Auditor General to probe Sh6.5 billion Covid-19 allotment
An education lobby group has called for an audit of the Sh6.5 billion allocated to the Ministry of Education to cushion schools from the effects of Covid-19 last year.
The Constitution and Reform Education Consortium (CRECO) petitioned Auditor General Nancy Gathungu to provide an audit report to show how the money was spent.
CRECO’s Executive Secretary Joshua Changwony regretted that as of today, the monies had not been audited to ascertain how they were spent.
“There is need for the Auditor General to provide an audit report to establish how the Sh6.5 billion allocated to the Ministry of Education under the eight–point agenda were utilised,” reads the statement.
In March last year, President Uhuru Kenyatta during his seventh presidential address, launched the Economic Stimulus Programme for the education sector and allocated Sh6.5 billion to the Ministry of Education to hire 10,000 teachers and 1,000 ICT interns to support digital learning during the pandemic.
The amounts were also to support the improvement of the school infrastructure including the acquisition of 250,000 locally fabricated desks to enable social distancing in schools.
Additionally, the president directed MPs to engage the National Government Constituency Development Fund (NG-CDF) to supplement government interventions to re - opening schools and make investments that focused on having additional hand washing points, facemasks, general sanitation and physical distancing for students and teachers to curb the spread of Covid-19 pandemic in schools.
But despite the interventions, the group raised concerns over how the implementation of the programme was done, especially the procurement of the 250,000 desks, citing lack of transparency.
The lobby demands that the Government undertakes an assessment of the distribution of the desks to establish whether there are gaps that still exist as well as provide the status of schools with regards to how many more desks are required.
“The current funding to schools is inadequate. Even if the allocation of desk assisted in improving social distancing, the procurement of these desks was never transparent,” adds the statement.
