Free Primary Education Capacity Building Initiatives on Performance of Public Primary Schools in Nairobi County

Abstract

The Government implemented the free primary education programme with the aim of providing more opportunities to the disadvantaged school age children, it created a positive outcome because it resulted in significant increase in enrolment in a majority of the schools. The purpose of this study was to establish the capacity building initiatives on the performance of public primary schools in Nairobi County.The objectives of this study were to establish the challenges of free primary education, establish the free primary education capacity building initiatives implemented and identify the relationship between free primary education capacity building initiatives and performance. Descriptive survey was used, this enabled the researcher obtain the opinions of headteachers in their respective schools The target population of the study was 205 public primary schools and a sample size of 136 was determined from the Krejice and Morgan table (1970), purposive sampling was used to select the sample from the target population and 100 of the self-administered questionnaires were analyzed. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse the data and establish the relationship between the dependent variables and the set of independent variables using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences software. The research found out that the challenges of free primary education and the free primary education capacity building initiatives greatly influenced the performance of public primary schools in Nairobi County. It was therefore concluded that the mentioned challenges need to be addressed quickly, as well as implement the proposed capacity building initiatives in order for the performance of public primary schools to improve, this will in turn increase their competitiveness. The main limitation of the study was that during data collection, most of the schools had closed for the August holidays