Adult Literacy Classes in Kenya: What a 1980s Study Found

What Was Kenya’s Literacy Programme Meant to Do?

Kenya’s programme was meant to wipe out adult illiteracy within five years. The President ordered it on 12 December 1978, and organised classes began in 1979 under a new Department of Adult Education (Carron et al., 1989). The first target was about 5 million illiterate adults. A later estimate based on the 1979 census put the figure for 1980/81 at 4.46 million, an illiteracy rate of 51.7% (Carron et al., 1989).

The design was ambitious. Learners were to become functionally literate in nine months, which meant 300–400 hours of classes at two hours a day, five days a week (Carron et al., 1989). Classes used the local language, except on the coast and in towns, where Kiswahili was the medium, and two primers were produced in 23 languages (Carron et al., 1989).

Teachers fell into three unequal groups: full-time, part-time and unpaid self-help teachers, and registered teachers fell from 13,204 in 1980 to 10,750 in 1984 (Carron et al., 1989).

Enrolment after the first rush

Enrolment peaked early. National figures fell from 415,074 learners in 1979 to 184,429 in 1985, or 44% of the first year’s level, and women made up about 77% of learners throughout (Carron et al., 1989). From 1980 to 1987, 108,485 learners were formally certified, set against the 5 million adults targeted in 1979 (Carron et al., 1989).

How Did the Researchers Test the Graduates?

They picked five contrasting locations and tested people who had already earned a literacy certificate. The study was a joint effort of Kenya’s Department of Adult Education, UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) and Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), which provided a grant (Carron et al., 1989). The locations ran from Starehe, a small part of Nairobi, to remote rural areas, and the authors say the sample does not represent Kenya as a whole (Carron et al., 1989).

Of the 660 people certified in 1981, 1983 and 1985 in the five locations, 388 were interviewed, 291 were tested and only 230 did both (Carron et al., 1989). Many graduates had moved away, and the authors warn that those who came to the test may have been the more confident ones (Carron et al., 1989).

Table 1. Certificate holders interviewed and tested in the five study locations, 1985–87

The two-hour test was designed for the study: 10 numeracy items, four reading questions on short texts and a short writing task. Learners were interviewed from October 1985 to March 1987 and tested from July 1986, and all 64 teachers were interviewed as well (Carron et al., 1989).

The authors are explicit about what they did not study. Impact on income, health and similar outcomes was left aside because it needed a different design and more resources (Carron et al., 1989). The design also gave the reading, writing and numeracy tests no baseline and no group of non-participants (Carron et al., 1989). A control group of 66 adults who had never attended literacy classes or primary school was used only for questions on everyday knowledge, attitudes and practices (Carron et al., 1989).

How Well Could Graduates Read, Write and Count?

Most graduates could manage the basics, but in each skill fewer than a third reached full mastery. The top rating, “good”, went to 29.2% in reading, 21.6% in writing and 28.5% in numeracy (Carron et al., 1989). Between about 70% and 80% reached at least an average level in each skill, and the mean numeracy score was 5.4 out of 10 (Carron et al., 1989).

The authors’ verdict was guarded. How satisfactory the results look, they wrote, depends on the standard applied (Carron et al., 1989). Most certificate holders had minimum skills, yet 20–30% could not read or write a simple sentence or do simple sums, which in their view raises doubts about how well the classes taught (Carron et al., 1989). Just 54.6% were at least average in all three skills, and 7.6% were rated good in all three (Carron et al., 1989).

Table 2. Test results of 291 certificate holders in five Kenyan locations, 1986–87

Place mattered more than teacher training

Results varied sharply between locations. The share at least average in all three skills ranged from 79.1% in South Maragoli to 26.0% in Isiolo Central (Carron et al., 1989). Isiolo had only full-time, trained teachers, but it also had poor living conditions, few textbooks and teaching in Kiswahili (Carron et al., 1989). The authors concluded that context outweighed teacher qualifications, though good inputs helped where conditions were favourable (Carron et al., 1989).

Women scored slightly below men, 5.2 against 5.6 in numeracy among 152 women and 78 men, and earlier primary schooling was weakly but significantly linked to every score (Carron et al., 1989).

Why Did Learners Take So Long and Drift Away?

Learners attended irregularly, and the authors trace falling enrolment to weakening demand rather than a shortage of classes (Carron et al., 1989). Certificate holders had spent a mean of 2.2 years in class against a one-year norm (nine months of teaching): 37.5% took one year, 32.7% two and the rest three or more (Carron et al., 1989). Starehe averaged 1.6 years and Isiolo Central 2.9 (Carron et al., 1989).

Absenteeism ran at about 30% in urban Starehe and above 50% in most rural locations, and enrolment in the five locations fell from 3,096 in 1981 to 1,481 in 1986 (Carron et al., 1989).

Supply shrank far less than demand: nationally, classes fell by 16% between 1980 and 1985 while enrolment fell by 54%, and the authors single out learner motivation as the central issue (Carron et al., 1989).

What learners wanted to read

Learners mainly wanted to read, write and calculate, and most often named Kiswahili or English as what they wanted to learn next; some 43% kept attending classes for one to five years after certification (Carron et al., 1989).

Did the Skills Last Beyond the Classroom?

The study did not detect rapid relapse into illiteracy, but its design could have hidden it. Graduates certified in 1981 and 1983 scored better than those certified in 1985, and the negative link between year of certification and score was statistically significant for reading and writing (Carron et al., 1989). The authors limited this finding to a small, highly motivated group who had stayed long enough to earn a certificate (Carron et al., 1989).

Other explanations remain open. Certificate standards may have eased over time, less confident earlier graduates may have stayed away from the test, and the cohorts differed in make-up, with weak Isiolo Central over-represented in the 1985 group (Carron et al., 1989).

Graduates did outscore a never-schooled comparison group on everyday knowledge, averaging 6.0 out of 7 against 4.8 (Carron et al., 1989). The gap mixes earlier schooling with the programme, since 55.8% of graduates but none of the comparison group had attended primary school (Carron et al., 1989).

Wider evidence on relapse is thin. A 2003 World Bank review found the subject little researched and the results contradictory, from 47% relapse in one Nepal programme to very little in Uganda, where most learners had been to school before (Abadzi, 2003). It also reported that only 12–60% of graduates sampled in some programmes, Kenya among them, later met literacy criteria (Abadzi, 2003). That range pools several countries and gives no separate Kenyan figure (Abadzi, 2003).

What Have Trials Found Since the Kenya Study?

In 2015 a World Bank blog post found only seven studies from the previous 25 years that it counted as estimating the effect of adult literacy programmes on literacy, with the Kenyan study the earliest listed; three of the seven were randomised trials (Evans, 2015).

In a trial in Niger, adding simple mobile-phone use to adult classes raised writing and maths scores by 0.19–0.26 standard deviations over standard classes (Aker et al., 2012). Skills declined in both groups after the classes ended, and the phone programme did not slow that decline, although its advantage persisted, mainly in maths (Aker et al., 2012). All villages in the trial also received food rations as an incentive to attend (Aker et al., 2012).

A later Niger trial reported that the standard adult programme raised maths and reading scores by 0.19–0.22 standard deviations over two years (Aker & Ksoll, 2019). Weekly phone calls to the teacher, the village chief and two randomly chosen students added a further 0.12 standard deviations in maths and 0.15 in reading (Aker & Ksoll, 2019). The abstract describes only the maths result as robust across its checks (Aker & Ksoll, 2019).

A certificate shows that an adult passed a test on one day; only a later test shows what that adult can still read.

In India, literacy classes for mothers raised the mothers’ own scores and had significant but modest effects on their children’s maths (Banerji et al., 2017). A 2017 review concluded that adult literacy programmes mostly show limited effects on literacy and numeracy, and that most evaluations still lack designs able to show cause and effect (Blunch, 2017). It counted Ghana and Niger as success stories and Venezuela as a failure, but warned that the Ghana evaluation may have been skewed by non-random programme placement (Blunch, 2017).

How Many Adults Lack Basic Literacy Today?

At least 739 million young people and adults lacked basic literacy skills in 2024, according to UNESCO, and about two-thirds of them, 466 million, were women (UNESCO, 2025). In sub-Saharan Africa the adult literacy rate rose from 65% to 69% between 2015 and 2024. Population growth still lifted the number of illiterate adults there from 196 million to 225 million (UNESCO, 2025).

These headline figures mostly rest on people declaring whether they can read, not on tests (UNESCO, 2025). The SDG indicator counts as literate someone who can read and write a short, simple sentence about everyday life with understanding (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2026).

Kenya’s literacy figures now

Kenya’s most recent tested figures come from its 2022 Demographic and Health Survey, in which 90.9% of women and 93.8% of men aged 15–49 were literate, from 26.9% of women in Mandera to 98.0% in Kisumu (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics & ICF, 2023).

The 2006 Kenya National Adult Literacy Survey put adult literacy at 61.5%, with 29.6% at the desired mastery level, using a different method from the 2022 survey (Kebathi, 2008). In 2025, 165,552 learners were enrolled in adult education, a provisional figure (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, 2026).

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Eleanor Hayes — author

Eleanor Hayes writes with an editorial focus on research methodology and study design, including experimental and observational studies, controls, sampling, measurement and the methodological choices that shape scientific conclusions. At CAB Direct, Eleanor co...