On a morning that should buzz with activity at Kaliluni Primary School in southern Kenya, only cattle roam the grounds, grazing between shattered classroom doors that hang ajar over rows of deserted seats.
Just three years ago, over 200 students filled this rural school with life and chatter. Today, only five pupils remain enrolled, and on the day of our visit neither they nor the sole teacher were present.
As we exited the crumbling compound, textbooks littered the floors of several classrooms, and we noticed a uniformed schoolgirl trudging sorrowfully toward her home.
Twelve‑year‑old Maureen Mwisiwa explains that she has been attending school each day for the past week only to discover she is the sole student present.
“I feel terrible missing lessons day after day while children at other schools continue their studies,” she told the BBC.
Her mother, Josephine Muasya, like the other parents still sending children to the school, intends to move Maureen to a different institution where most of her friends now study—a journey of roughly eight kilometres (five miles) over rough terrain.
With no public transportation available in this isolated part of Kitui County—over 200 kilometres east of Nairobi—the children instead take a shortcut, hiking across uneven ground.
The walk to her new school will take Maureen just over an hour, compared with the ten‑minute trek she used to make to Kaliluni Primary.
“I had hoped the government would revive the school, adding teachers and resources to support the new curriculum,” her mother says, “but there is now no hope.”
Muasya is referencing the sweeping reform of Kenya’s education system launched in 2017—a shift away from exam‑heavy instruction toward a more creative, practical model called Competency‑Based Education (CBE).
Yet this reform is wreaking havoc on rural junior schools; Kaliluni Primary is among more than 2,000 institutions nationwide that risk closure as enrollment continues to drop.
