Schools are losing Sh2.1bn through wasted books
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
02 February 2014
I still recall the first time that I started realizing that something was amiss with our economy. It was many decades ago while I was still in secondary school. We opened school on one term and the headmaster announced that there was a delay in getting the regular supply of exercise books. So he urged us to be very careful when using the ones we already had and to make sure that every available space is used up before requesting for a replacement.
Ruled exercise books had 21 lines from the top to the bottom and with a large blank space left at the top of each page. Our normal practice was to leave the top line unused, so our headmaster made a new rule that no book would be replaced if this line hadn’t been used.
He explained that if each pupil used the extra line we would save 120 lines for every 120-page book. That was equivalent to six pages per book. Since the school had about 500 students, the cumulative saving would be to 3,000 pages; or 25 120-page exercise books!
This was the expected saving per subject; but each student was taking eight. Therefore, with this simple practice, we would save 25 x 8 = 200 exercise books of 120 pages each. In today’s money, that would have been about Sh7,000…
But our class-teacher was more serious about the exercise book saving idea. He ordered us to draw three additional lines in the large blank space at the top of the page and to ignore the margins. He reckoned that writing in the margin would save three lines; then, adding the other three at the top would make a total of 6 lines per page!
Thus we would save 34 pages out of every 120-page exercise book. In a class of 30, that came to just over 1,000 pages per subject, or 8.5 books. In total, when all eight subjects are included, our class was saving at least 68 exercise books per term. That is more than two from each pupil!
Now I remembered this incident recently when schools opened for the new academic year. I noticed a very wasteful habit that schools have adopted: pupils are issued with brand new exercise books at the beginning of each year. The unused pages in the old ones are wasted.
I pulled out a random bunch of old books from my children’s drawers and checked the level of usage. All combined, the books had 384 pages – it looks awkward, but that’s because there was a 64-page art book.
Out the 384 pages, only 141 had been used up. That is a wastage of 243 pages, or about 63 per cent! Considering that each pupil gets about 10 books under the Free Primary Education (FPE) Programme, it means that 6 are left unused at the end of the year.
With about 10 million children in the FPE, we are looking at 60 million books going to waste each year. But I am not as concerned about the money wasted (Sh2.1bn) as I am about the wasteful habit that children are picking from school.
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