Nakuru County public primary schools face shortage or poor sanitation due to the increasing number of child enrollment in the schools.
Speaking to our reporter, Nakuru County Health executive Samuel Mwaura said that the county has 620 public primary schools, which have a population of 358,811 pupils of which 181,738 are boys and 177,073 are girls.
According to the official government figures, of the 620 registered government public primary schools in Nakuru County, 482 do not meet this requirement.
Nakuru County has a total of 9,655 toilets against a total student population of 323,447. A pupil has to wait for approximately ten minutes in a queue before getting a chance to use the toilet himself. This greatly affects class attendance.
At St Francis Primary School, 165 pupils share a toilet while schools like Makongeni, Oljorai and Kibowen Komen have at least 145 students sharing a toilet.
According to Esther Magere, a social worker in Nakuru County, girls in public primary schools are known to miss school during their menstrual period, saying that the toilets do not offer the privacy they need for them to change their sanitary towels.
“For a child to miss four or five days of school due to a natural occurrence is simply wanting. The girls claim that the toilet doors cannot shut or are broken and many boys in upper classes take advantage of this to try and peep when the girls are in the toilets,” said Magere.