KLB Faces Ksh600 Million Loss As CBC Changes Leave Learning Materials At Risk

Millions of shillings worth of textbooks could end up gathering dust in warehouses, the Kenya Literature Bureau, KLB, has told Parliament, as looming changes to the Competency-Based Curriculum, CBC, threaten to render a chunk of its stock obsolete.

Appearing before the National Assembly Education Committee on Thursday, KLB Managing Director George Okeyo put a figure on the problem: roughly Ksh600 million in learning materials that may simply have no buyers once the curriculum is revised.

The session was meant to scrutinise how the bureau had implemented its 2025/2026 budget, but Okeyo used the opportunity to flag what he described as a looming financial headache.

The materials at risk, he explained, are tied to curriculum changes stemming from the Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms, whose recommendations were adopted back in the 2023/2024 financial year.

His ask to the committee was blunt: help us figure out what to do with stock that the revised curriculum will effectively make redundant.

The warning lands at a moment when the Ministry of Education is still ironing out kinks in the CBC system, which took over from the old 8-4-4 structure and has faced a bumpy rollout ever since.

Under the current setup, the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development handles everything from needs assessments to curriculum design and the actual production of teaching materials, a pipeline that gets disrupted every time the curriculum itself shifts.

But textbooks weren’t the only thing on the table Thursday. Committee members also pressed Okeyo on why KLB left money unspent during the year under review.

Of the Ksh2.2 billion set aside for recurrent costs, the bureau only spent Ksh1.9 billion. Okeyo blamed part of the shortfall on the National Treasury, which he said approved a supplementary budget too late for the funds to be fully utilised.

Development spending told a similar story, a Ksh44.5 million gap, or about 41 per cent of what had been allocated. According to Okeyo, the bureau struggled to commit those funds because tenders floated for printing equipment kept coming back non-responsive.

Then came questions about personnel costs. MPs wanted to know why more than Ksh79 million meant for gratuity and pension payments went unspent.

Kitutu Masaba MP Clive Gisairo didn’t mince words, asking directly whether KLB had simply failed to hire the staff it budgeted for, or had overestimated its personnel needs from the start.

KLB wasn’t the only agency in the hot seat that day. The committee’s review also took in the State Department for Research and Innovation, the Kenya National Innovation Agency, the National Research Fund, and the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation.

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