Inclusive education’s legal and policy implementation in Kenya
This is the second article in a series on inclusive educations laws, policies and statutes. This article examines how inclusive education policy implementation has played out in Kenya.
Jun 30, 2026
Kenya is committed to providing inclusive education at all levels of basic education, and has rolled out implementation guidelines to ensure that inclusive education is promoted at all stages of basic education. However, lack of accurate data is reflected in the limited allocation of resources and programming for children with disabilities. According to the Kenya demographic Health survey of 2022 Kenya has approximately 420,000 children living with disability, about 2.2% of the total population, which is likely to be an undercount as the World Health organization averages 15% of the population in global estimates. VSO’s Kenya National Special needs education survey report places the prevalence of disability among children at 13.5%, which is closer to the global estimate.
The gap between Kenya’s global commitments, policy ambitions, implementation aspirations and what happens in classrooms is widely documented repeatedly but remains un- addressed and perennially low on the governments’ priorities.
Thanks for reading The Belonging Blueprint’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Subscribe
Identification and assessment
The government has established education assessment research centres with a mandate to carry out assessment of children with disabilities. Each county is said to have an EARC at the county headquarters, though the national budget of 2022 earmarked funds for upgrade of only 16 of these centres. These centres are few and are not able to conduct timely assessment for all children with disability, for example in 2019/20, only 10,320 children were assessed. Many children with disabilities are never formally assessed and therefore continue to be misidentified as “slow” or “badly behaved” and many end up out of school. Assessment centers run by the Ministry of Education are unevenly spread across counties, waiting times are long and families in remote areas sometimes travel long distances, at real cost, just to access them. Other challenges include lack of qualified personnel, inadequate equipment for assessment as well as weak policies.
Teacher Capacity and Classroom Practice
Even when learners with disabilities are enrolled in mainstream classrooms, the quality of inclusion depends heavily on individual teachers rather than on any systemic support. While the CBE calls for differentiation, class sizes are well above recommended pupil-teacher ratios in many public primary schools make individual attention nearly impossible. Training gaps make this worse. Many teachers who did receive special needs training did so years or decades ago, before the shift toward inclusion, therefore even teachers who want to help may assume that a learner with a disability should be referred to a special school rather than supported where they are.
Infrastructure, technology and Assistive Technology
Physical access is one of the most obvious barriers and lack of access is the most visible failure. Many schools, especially older ones, weren’t built with accessibility in mind: They do not contain ramps, accessible toilets, adapted desks or even space to accommodate physical mobility devices. Some donor-funded and government infrastructure programs have built accessibility into new construction, but retrofitting existing schools has been slow and uneven. Assistive devices like braille materials, hearing aids, sign language resources, wheelchairs, screen-reading software are expensive, remain scarce, and where they are available, maintenance and replacement is often not sustainable. Meanwhile, the digital divide continues to widen as only about 22% of Kenyan learners have access to the internet in learning, with less than 10% of learners in public schools having regular access to digital learning materials.
Financing
Underpinning most of these gaps is funding. According to the Kenya Institute for public policy research and analysis (KIPPRA), in 2023/24 financial year, the government spent 666 billion on education, a total of 31.2% of total government expenditure. However, special education only received 212 million, out of the required 536 million, a funding gap of 60%. The Capitation grants under Free Primary Education and Free Day Secondary Education include a top-up for learners with special needs, but the amounts are too low to cover assistive devices, specialized materials, or extra staffing. Recurrent disbursement delays hit inclusive education programming especially hard, since schools facing funding gaps tend to prioritize urgent needs first in allocating resources.
Regional and Socioeconomic Disparities
While resourcing gaps are almost universal, implementation and roll out of inclusive education varies sharply by region. Approximately 70% of learners live in rural areas where resources are scarce. Counties in arid and semi-arid areas, along with informal settlements in cities, tend to have fewer trained special education teachers, fewer assessment centers, and less accessible infrastructure than urban regions.
Civil Society and Community Responses
Where government systems have moved slowly, civil society organizations have stepped in through teacher training, providing assistive devices, student sponsorship and community awareness campaigns to reduce stigma. These efforts produce localized results, much of which is project-based and time-bound, which raises questions about scale and sustainability.
Closing the Gap
Kenya’s legal and policy frameworks for inclusive education reflect a genuinely progressive intent, but legislative gaps around enforceable accessibility standards, under resourcing, outdated disability rights law, inadequate inclusive teacher training, and the absence of systematic data have left implementation inconsistent. Closing that gap would require aligning the language around inclusion across all relevant laws, policies and statutes, modernizing laws, policies and statutes to match the Constitution and recently adopted disability rights legislation, making inclusive education training a core part of pre-service and continuous professional development for teachers, school leaders and education sector professionals, allocating adequate resources for school infrastructure, individual learner support, community or family support, and prioritizing the collection of disaggregated data system to track outcomes for learners with disabilities over time. Inclusive education isn’t just about a child’s physical presence in a classroom, it’s about ensuring that they can actually participate, learn, and thrive alongside their peers and continue to live a full and productive life into adulthood.
Written by Stella W Chege for the ATP Trainer of trainers in inclusive education course.
