REIMAGING PUBLIC-PRIVATE NEXUS IN ACCELERATING WOMEN’S PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

Abstract

Despite significant progress in recent years, gender disparities in education persist! The main objective of the study is to establish the role of public-private nexus in accelerating women’s progressive education. The significance of the study is to expand access to progressive and quality education for women, inform policies, enhance capacity to upscale women’s holistic learning and, most importantly, alleviate Kenya’s weak nexus between women empowerment policies and quality education. The study also seeks to promote resilience and innovativeness among higher education institutions so as to emerge stronger and holistically support women's empowerment and girls' education. The study adopted John Dewin’s theory of education and Social Capital Theory as the study underpinning theory to support the variables. The study adopted a mixed-method research design strengthened with pragmatism and constructivism as the appropriate research paradigm. The study focused on students as the key unit of observation. The lecturers’ views were sought since the researcher adopted a learner-centered approach using cross-sectional data. In addition, secondary data and key informant interviews were used to get facts from government published data, industry-based reports and community-based organisations. Questionnaires were used to collect primary data from the study respondents. The study sample size comprised 129 students. The study also targeted 60 lecturers who were teaching during the same period. The study adopted stratified sampling techniques. The study findings revealed that 29(67.44%) of the respondents stated that public-private partnerships provide access and avenues for women’s progressive education. The overall regression results revealed that there is a statistically significant relationship between the public-private nexus and women’s progressive education with a regression coefficient of 0.164, a t-value of 1.62, and a p-value of 0.1000. The result implies that the coefficient of the public-private nexus is statistically significant at a 10 per cent level of significance. The magnitude of the coefficient of public-private nexus is 0.164. This implies that ceteris paribus, one percent increase in the score of public-private nexus leads to a 16% change in women’s progressive education. The study also found a 16% projection rate of student enrollment annually with enhanced public-private nexus. The study concludes that synergistic-quadripartite partnership enhanced and collaboration plays a vital role in accelerating women’s progressive education. The study recommends strengthening synergistic-quadripartite partnerships with industry partners to enhance the public-private nexus and women’s progressive education while integrating gender perspectives in curriculum development. To enhance sustainable partnerships, institutions should forge a framework for a memorandum of understanding with industry players and agree on partnership and collaborative opportunities. Higher learning institutions should leverage innovation through transformative pedagogical approaches and fostering institutional-industry collaboration to address skills mismatch in the labour market.

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