Why many Kenyan A students sent to India are lost forever

By Leon Lidigu

There is a very big problem with our academic system.

All these As that people ululate and celebrate every year after KCSE results are announced—where do they usually go post-campus? Do they even make it post-campus into careers? Because look around… Kenya is run mostly by C students.

Our academic system is designed to make children’s ultimate goal getting an A at KCSE. Most are psychologically exhausted and still have in their bellies because they were only programmed to get an A—under strict supervision of private schools where they were heavily spoon-fed, drilled, and basically taught how to pass exams and get an A.

In campus, they can’t stand on their own. Since you put them in a box, they finally get the freedom they have never had in their lives—freedom that comes with minimal to no supervision.

I studied in India from 2017 with Kenyan students who got As and had been sent there to do medicine, law, computer science, among other courses.

The year is 2026.

Many are still trapped in New Delhi, drowning in alcohol, and do not even have first-semester results.

Shock of a different academic system

Now let me borrow from the Indian academic system.

It is very rigorous and comprehensive and does not rely on multiple-choice questions like many students are used to in Kenya across the academic ladder over the years.

Here is what I mean.

In an exam, when they ask you who Kenya’s President is for two marks, the lecturer in India does not expect you to just write William Ruto and move on. He expects you to give a comprehensive answer in two pages. This means you have to read and know who William Ruto is very well—from his YK92 days to where he is now—and then put it all down.

Top performers at Sheikh Khalifa Secondary School Mohammed Hassan Aziz and Abdulghafur Issa Timamy celebrate their academic success after the release of the KCSE results on Friday, January 9, 2026 at the school. Photo/Sahifa Media

It means, as a student, you have to attend class, pay attention to every little detail, and read cover to cover throughout campus to be able to sit an exam.

That is why Indian doctors, for example, are among the best in the world. Each semester after you sit exams, your results plus scripts are sent again to the national government exam body for review.

During final semester exams—every semester—lecturers from, say, Masinde Muliro University will be dispatched to Pwani University to supervise exams, mark scripts, and submit results to government, which then furnishes the university with final results of each student after certifying everything and having an independent body look at the scripts again and again.

After you graduate, the government takes one whole year vetting your degree and going through everything you did throughout campus before giving you your degree and transcripts. After that, you dispatch them to the Education Attaché at the Kenya High Commission in New Delhi for further verification and authentication, which they also enter into their official records.

Dark side of studying abroad

As I pen this, many Kenyan students who got As and were sent to India are still there. Some have changed courses five or so times until they gave up, dropped out, and are now stuck there.

For female students, it is much more challenging.

Some of your children have gotten pregnant there, given birth, and are cohabiting with Nigerian and Kenyan boyfriends—mostly without your knowledge. The money you send for upkeep is being used to silently fund your grandchildren.

Graduands at a past graduation ceremony in a Kenyan university. Photo/KNA

I remember a conversation with one of my friends who had just decided to drop out and go back home. The problem was she had silently given birth to twins for her Indian boyfriend.

“I would rather go home in a coffin than go home with these babies, because my dad would kill me if he ever found out,” she told me.

Culturally in India, it is the woman who pays bride price, so there was no way the boy’s family was letting him marry her.

A few weeks later, I painfully learned that she actually put those twin babies in an open carton box and dumped them outside a Catholic children’s home, after which she fled back to Kenya and has never looked back.

There is also a male Kenyan student from Machakos—a very sharp guy—who was pursuing Computer Science. He had been cohabiting with a fellow Kenyan student whom he dumped for another.

According to fellow Kenyan students, the female student he dumped was so upset and heartbroken that she screamed “rape” after their last night together and made the used condom available to the police—according to police records.

To date, the gentleman is in an Indian prison for life, wasting away, while the girl is back at the Coast and her life has moved on. Asked for her side of the story, she declined to comment.

The Kenya High Commission in India is aware of the case but told me they do not have resources to make a lawyer available for him, because everyone—even terrorists—deserves a fair trial, which he has never gotten.

Alcohol is also cheaper in India than in Kenya, and most boys and girls drown in it.

I have a friend who went to study nursing in India—very smart. A year later, her parents sent her younger sister to do the same course. Unfortunately, my friend chose to cohabit with a Nigerian boy studying medicine. He attended class; she did not. Instead, she remained behind cooking and cleaning for him.

He graduated. To date, since 2017, she does not even have first-semester results.

Her younger sister, introduced to another Nigerian guy, also chose “love” instead of books. Recently, I saw posters of my friend and her boyfriend wanted in India for drug trafficking, complete with the aliases they use there.

They cannot leave India and have no papers to show why they went there in the first place, because India will not renew your student residency if you are not attending classes. I am afraid my friend and her little sister might never come back home.

That is how A students you send abroad are sometimes lost—perhaps forever.

When education ignores the whole child

Another Kenyan man I met is a 66-year-old from Keroka, Kisii, who does mjengo in India. He told me that in the 1980s he got a scholarship to study electrical engineering there. His hope was to lift his entire village out of abject poverty.

In first semester, he got an Indian girl pregnant. In Bharat, if you do so, you must marry her—no “baby mama” stories. The government confiscated his passport so he could not flee and put him on red alert.

They broke up after two years. By then, he had dropped out to be a dad and moved to Kerala to avoid gossip. One day, the woman and child vanished. By the time he returned to New Delhi, ten years had elapsed. The police station handling his case had moved; officers had died. His passport and file were gone.

He lived on the streets, speaking fluent Hindi, doing odd jobs—mjengo embraced him. He has moved city to city all his life. The last time he was in Kenya, Daniel Moi was President.

He told me he has made peace with the fact that one day he will die there, on the streets.

“What is there in Kenya to go back to? My parents, siblings, and everyone who knew me are dead. I don’t even remember what our village looks like,” he told me.

Why am I saying all this?

Getting As is good—very good. But so is discipline, decision-making, and letting children learn to stand on their own independently so they can be all-round and capable enough to face life.

University of Nairobi’s The Fountain of Knowledge. Photo/UoN

You wake children at 4 a.m. to catch buses in the cold, their small backs overloaded with huge dictionaries and textbooks they never open in Grade 4. They never play. Holidays are back-to-back homework and tuition.

By the time they sit KCSE, they are mentally exhausted because all you focused on was a “good top school” and not their all-round growth as human beings.

When exactly are we going to let children be children?

Preparing students for the future should include more than drilling them to get As. While CBC is busy teaching Grade 4 students how to make scarecrows, the Indian child at the same level is learning coding and robotics.

How do you expect the two to compete for the same job?

Some ask me how I “hacked” India.

First, I went to Lenana School. No one spoon-feeds you there. You are free to breathe, make decisions, read extensively, and explore talent. That laid my foundation.

Second, I saw my mother work relentlessly, even wearing one pair of shoes for months, just to pay fees for my brother and me. My conscience would not allow anything to derail her sacrifice.

“Make sure I don’t turn out as a parent who sold cows to take another cow to school; for you might take a cow to the river, but the choice to drink water remains the cow’s,” she told me before I boarded an Oman Air flight to Mumbai.

Leon Lidigu, a multi-award winning health journalist, graduated with a First Class Summa Cum Laude in Journalism from Pacific University, India.