Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha has dismissed calls to increase payment for contractors building the Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) classrooms.
Speaking at Parklands Arya Girls High School in Nairobi where he commissioned a classroom and announced that contractors who had been paid.
Magoha said the Sh788,000 for the construction of one classroom was set after factoring in the contractor’s profit.
“In terms of the target of completion, it is the end of this month with a standard deviation of another seven days to March 1 – 7. Come March 7, we do not want contractors in our schools because we do not trust people with our children when they are doing their exams,” he said.
Some contractors have asked the government to pay them Sh1.26 million per classroom, citing high construction expenses.
“People thought that somehow some money would be increased. The people who don’t want to do so should step aside and we get others. There are so many people who can build. It(project) was not meant for the contractors,” he said.
However, he did say that the project has been going well overall, with the best region so far being the northern part of the country, with a completion rate of 93 per cent in Garissa, 81 per cent in Mandera, and 77 per cent in Wajir.
“This is encouraging because we thought it is the area that would have been a problem. Nyanza is also doing well, all the counties there have done well. The best performing area where 43 classrooms have already been received in Siaya out of the about 200 that are to be built,” Magoha said.
Following the release of Sh4 billion, construction of the first phase of the school infrastructure development program began in November.
The Sh4 billion, which will be supplemented by Sh1.2 billion from the Ministry of Education’s infrastructure fund, will be used to build 6,500 classrooms in 6,371 secondary schools across the country.
The program is designed to address the classroom deficit in public secondary schools, allowing CBC Grade 6 students to smoothly transition to Junior Secondary in January 2023.
