Gov’t will pay exam fees for all candidates, Mbadi says amid public uproar

Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi has moved to calm growing public anger following the government's plan to phase out the national examination fee waiver, assuring Kenyans that the government will cover the cost of national exams for all students this year.

In a Monday night town hall meeting on Citizen TV, Mbadi clarified that while initial budget allocations did not include funds for exams such as the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams, the Treasury has since made the money available.

“Initially, we did not provide examination fees for this year, but we have made the money available,” Mbadi said. “I assure all Kenyan students that they will sit their exams. The government will pay for it; we are just restructuring the system.”

Previously, Mbadi cited the unsustainability of the decade-long exam subsidy against budget deficits as the reason the government was scraping the waiver.

The move would see the Ministry of Education introduce a differentiated model of charging parents for examination fees, such that only learners from vulnerable households enjoy exam waivers.

In the Monday town hall meeting, the Treasury CS revealed that the Cabinet had raised concerns over the high cost of administering exams, specifically questioning why exam materials were being printed abroad.

“What happened was that as Cabinet, we did not like the money that was being spent on exams; we didn’t understand why examinations were printed out of the country, yet more sensitive documents like passports are printed here,” Mbadi noted.

The Treasury boss further explained that the Education Ministry has been tasked with developing a more cost-effective framework for conducting national assessments which is significantly lower.

“The Ministry had to come up with a more realistic structure of administering and funding exams, not the Ksh.11 billion that was being spent,” he said.

The initial plan to drop the fee waiver had sparked a national uproar, with concerns that the move would place an unbearable burden on poor households and risk widening inequality in access to education.

The exam fee waiver was introduced in 2015 as part of the government’s push toward free and compulsory basic education.