This chapter has presented a literature review on Primary
education and entrepreneurship in Africa. Having focused mainly on private
education in that part of the world as well as Free Primary education
initiative, related existing literature published by authors and researchers on
the topics were scrutinized. This has enabled us to establish the theoretical
underpinnings of the research. Firstly, we sought to explain different
variables surrounding education in Africa with particular foci on private
school for the poor on the continent. An appraisal of their dominance over
government schools even despite the Free Primary Education initiative was
elaborated and critics' points of view of this form of provision were equally
visited. As another major focus of our study was about entrepreneurship in
Africa, general aspects of the topics were studied with an emphasis laid on
concerns about its realities. The sections have been structured in such a way
that a thorough understanding of the research analysis will be possible.
Finally, the last section was concerned with the look at a
set of educational entrepreneurs in Kenya and their contributions towards to
betterment of private school provision in Kenya. This section has produced some
facts about the efficacy of such gathering. With the KISA, it is obvious that
the private schools in Kenya will stand as major provider of quality education
in urban slums especially for the poorest, HIV/AIDS orphans and low-income
families.
Chapter Three - Methodology
The methodology chapter reports on the various ways the
research has been carried out and presented. In order to allow an in-depth
analysis of the research questions, a case study was found most appropriate.
The advantage of this specific approach remains the fact that it offers the
researcher the opportunity to probe deeply and analyse interactions between the
factors that explain present status or that influence change or growth and it
therefore provides a ground for one aspect of a problem to be studied in some
depth (Best, J &Kahn 2003:249, Bell 2005:10).
The case study is defined as a research strategy which
focuses on the understanding the dynamics present within single settings and
can employ embedded design or better still multiple level of analysis within a
single study (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 1984).
A number of 20 private school owners (entrepreneurs), 25
teachers and 25 pupils of 5 selected schools were thus chosen to focus the
study on. Researching primary education and entrepreneurship in East Africa
henceforth required specific method that would provide a better understanding
of the complexities surrounding entrepreneurship. From these perspectives, it
then sounded very obvious and relevant to find in the case study approach the
most adequate way of conducting our research considering the socio-economic
environment in which it was done.
However, this structural approach has always met severe
critics from scholars «misunderstandings» of its operational ability
to offer concrete results (Tellis 1997, Yin. Some of the most common points for
these misunderstandings are generally related to the fact that, with this
approach:
> The theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical
knowledge.
> One cannot generalise from a single case, therefore, the
single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development.
> The case study is most useful for generating hypotheses,
whereas other methods are more suitable for hypothesis testing and theory
building.
> The case study contains a bias toward verification, and
> It is often difficult to summarise specific case studies
(Flyvbjerg, 2006:219) Nonetheless, in a response to a major point of these
concerns, namely that of the generalization in case studies, (Denscombe 1998,
cited in Bell, 2005:11) rightly points out that:
«The extent to which findings from case study can be
generalized to other examples in the class depends on how far the case study
example is similar to others of its type».
Closely related to this last aspect, our conviction still
remained that, the field of education, being very broad and extended in the
overall social sciences, needed some case studies in order to critically
analyse certain phenomenon. The motivation gearing to the massive presence of
private school entrepreneurs and the mushrooming of private schools catering
for the poor in a slum such as Kibera could only be well understood through a
case study approach.
