I can’t resist that headline: “Unscrupulous book vendors on the loose.” Unfortunately it’s a real headline, appearing in today’s Business Daily Africa. Academic performance and test scores have plummeted lately in Kenya, and one cause for this has been identified. “Textbook pirates” print up cheap and incomplete or outright fake versions of school textbooks — and students and schools are buying this junk, because it’s cheap and they don’t realize they’re being duped:
“In the wake of troubling reports that performance in last year’s Kenya Certificate of Secondary Examinations dropped, an influx of substandard books into schools looks set to deliver more shocks to the sector. Unscrupulous book vendors and pirates are increasingly printing books recommended by the Ministry of Education for use in secondary schools, most of which are of low quality compared to what is in the curriculum, education officials said. While this piracy is denying Kenya’s lucrative book publishing industry millions of shillings annually, educationists are raising a red flag that quality education is at stake. Education minister, Profesor Sam Ongeri, told Business Daily that quality assurance officers at the Ministry have launched investigations into the scam.’We have cases of two books which we are investigating to validate whether the contents of the books are the same as those in the approved books,’ Ongeri said.”