A Sh7.3 billion ($73 million) literacy programme has significantly boosted the reading abilities of Kenyan children, increasing four-fold the number of Class Two children that passed English fluency tests in 2016.
The Tusome programme has been implemented by the government with donor support from the United States and the United Kingdom. A recently released study on the programme says that 47 per cent of Class Two pupils passed national benchmarks for English fluency in 2016, up from 12 per cent in 2015. The number of Class One pupils that could read Kiswahili words had grown from 30 per cent in 2015 to 55 per cent last year.
