KEWOTA CEO Benter Opande Challenges Uncoordinated Education Reforms: “Are These Shifts Uplifting or Sinking Education?”
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By John Kariuki
As Kenya’s education landscape undergoes another seismic shift, Benter Opande, CEO of the Kenya Women Teachers Association (KEWOTA), has issued a blunt and urgent critique of the Ministry of Education’s latest reforms—branding them as unstructured, rushed, and dangerously disconnected from ground realities.
Her warning follows the government’s recent directive making Mathematics compulsory to senior school under the Competency-Based Education (CBE) system—an evolution of the CBC that many educators are still trying to grasp.
“This isn’t just about changing names from CBC to CBE,” Opande cautions. “It’s about introducing fundamental changes without clarity, consultation, or capacity building. Where is the end game?”
Opande decries the absence of a unified roadmap or dialogue, questioning why such a significant rebrand has no legislative anchor or structured national engagement process. She emphasizes that the burden is falling squarely on teachers—already grappling with curriculum fatigue, shifting lesson outcomes, and new eight-tier assessment tools.
Most concerning, she says, is the institutional dysfunction among key education bodies—MoE, KICD, KNEC, and TSC—which operate in legal silos with no data-sharing or policy alignment. “It’s not an accident,” she remarks. “The system is built to be fragmented. Without legal reform, we are chasing shadows.”
Opande’s call is clear: Legislate. Consult. Harmonize. Only then can education reforms move from aspiration to actual transformation.
“Until then,” she warns, “we are reforming without reforming—and the learners are paying the price.”
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