Britain has frozen £10 million education aid for Kenya’s schools over alleged looting of £800,000 from earlier funding, official sources revealed Wednesday.
An audit investigation of education spending established that several hundreds of thousands of pounds went missing from June’s accounts this year.
The United Kingdom government has already spent £45 million supporting free primary and secondary education since 2005 in the East African nation.
Officials are expressing regrets at the misappropriation of the financial aid shouldered mostly by UK our taxpayers’ ; which “we thought was going to be used to improve education for kids, more text books, better classrooms, better teaching.”
“Instead some of it has been stolen by people who organized fraudulent workshops that never happened, manufactured receipts, walked off with the money and did so reasonably confident, they thought, that they wouldn’t get caught”, said Alistair Fernie, head of the Department for International Development.
Britain was due to hand over a further £10 million in early 2010 to the Kenya Education Sector Support Programme ; which is also backed by the Canadian government, the World Bank and the United Nations special agency for children – UNICEF.
Now Britain says the money “will only be released when the Kenyan education ministry acts”, including the prosecution of officials/people suspected of the fraud, as well as the replacement of the lost funds and an improvement in financial management systems.
Worried by the high level of corruption in the African nation, the UK government has over the years been concerned about channeling the European country’s annual £70 million a year in aid to Kenya directly to its government.
Source African Press Agency
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