The distribution this Thursday (March 17) of more than Kshs. 1.1 Million (US$14,700) in initial seed grants to ten public primary schools in Kenya will mark the implementation phase of a School Safe Zones initiative intended to eventually embrace all public schools across the nation. Widely heralded free primary education in Kenya, introduced two years ago, is now facing its own set of challenges, including classroom congestion, lack of learning materials and desks, low teacher motivation, insecurity and drug abuse. But the government of Kenya, the global humanitarian agency Church World Service and a national task force of Kenyan educators, parents, religious leaders and other public and private sector stakeholders have been working together for nearly two years to create sustainable solutions for those problems.

The International Federation of Journalists has condemned the detention of Somali journalist Abdirisak Ahmed Absuge who was arrested 5 March by the authorities of the Middle Shebelle region. "The authorities should either release Absuge or charge him. They can not indiscriminately detain journalists without reason," said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary. This latest event comes shortly after the murder of BBC journalist Kate Peyton which raised many concerns regarding the protection and safety of media professionals in Somalia.

The Kenyan education system, as evident in the English curriculum, is still preying on colonial ambivalence and imperial mimicry more than 40 years after ‘independence’, writes A. Kiprono Langat. "The lack of innovative measures to locate literature within the context on the new ‘Kenya’, the politicization of the process of text selections, and the lack of proper representation of teachers in the choice of curriculum texts has impacted significantly on the teachers’ fear of losing the desire, psychologically or otherwise, for their teaching obligations. Most literature teachers in Kenya seem to have lost (either consciously or unconsciously) their professional attachments to the curriculum material they teach," he writes.

"One may argue that neocolonial dominancy of the ‘haves’ over the ‘have not’, be it within the education(al) structures, the book publishing firms and/or the political/tribal party politics, has produced and reproduced sycophantic hegemonies that have and will continue to adversely affect teachers’ teaching desires of prescribed classroom texts." Langat is conducting research into literature set books in Kenya and is appealing for input from readers.