Kenya’s literacy classes in the 1980s: what a local-level survey measured
Between 1985 and 1987 a study run jointly by Kenya’s Department of Adult Education and UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning interviewed and tested graduates of the national literacy programme in five contrasting locations. A 1990 article reported the findings, and a 2015 World Bank blog post counts the study among impact studies of adult education.
What the study did and found
The article, “The Functioning and Effects of the Kenya Literacy Program” by Gabriel Carron, appeared in African Studies Review in December 1990. It condenses a 1989 IIEP research report by Carron, Kilemi Mwiria and Gabriel Righa: of 660 people certified in 1981, 1983 and 1985 in five purposively chosen locations, the team interviewed 388 and tested 291 between 1985 and 1987 (Carron et al., 1989).
Between about 70% and 80% of those tested reached at least an average level in each skill, but full mastery was rarer, from 21.6% in writing to 29.2% in reading, and learners needed about two years on average to earn a certificate against a planned one year (Carron et al., 1989).
Why it is cited
The one referring page recorded here is a 2015 post on the World Bank’s Development Impact blog by David Evans, which links to the record in a list of seven studies that, in the post’s words, “estimate the impact of adult literacy programs on adult literacy”.
That label overstates the Kenyan work, which describes the skills graduates reached without estimating what the classes added.
The locations were chosen on purpose and are not nationally representative, only certificate holders were tested, and the skill tests had no baseline and no untaught comparison group (Carron et al., 1989).
Later randomised trials measure effects more rigorously: in Niger, adding mobile-phone use to adult classes raised writing and maths scores by 0.19–0.26 standard deviations (Aker et al., 2012).
The topic today
UNESCO estimates that at least 739 million youth and adults lacked basic literacy skills in 2024, nearly two-thirds of them women (UNESCO, 2025). In Kenya’s 2022 Demographic and Health Survey, 90.9% of women aged 15–49 counted as literate (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics & ICF, 2023).
For the current picture, see our explainer Adult Literacy Classes in Kenya: What a 1980s Study Found.