Evaluation of Re-Entry Policy on Retention of Schoolgirl Mothers in Primary Schools in Busia County: Addressing Engagement, Assessment and Feedback

The constitution of Kenya 2010 envisages basic education as a right for every child to enable attainment of vision 2030 and SDG 4 for effective economic participation and growth. However, low retention rates of school-girl mothers in public primary schools remain an issue in Busia County, Kenya. More still, the region has witnessed disproportionately high adolescent birth rates lowering learning outcomes. To address this, re-entry policy program was instituted in 1999 to improve schoolgirl retention rates for enhanced participation in national building. While re-entry policy exist, effectiveness may be compromised by implementation gaps arising from weak stakeholder engagement, unstructured assessment and inappropriate feedback mechanisms. The study is premised on Tinto’s Learner Retention Theory, which emphasizes stakeholder participatory evaluation process as link for institutional integration, social integration, and student commitment, towards implementing re-entry policy. The objective was to establish the influence of participatory evaluation on retention of school girl mothers. The study used descriptive cross-sectional design capturing quantitative data. The population consisted of 328 re-entered schoolgirl mothers and 221 re-entry teachers. The sample consisted of 100 schoolgirl mothers and 66 teachers using multistage cluster sampling procedure. Quantitative data was collected using learner and teacher questionnaire and analysed using descriptive statistics and linear regression model approaches. The findings revealed significant relationship between participatory evaluation and the retention of schoolgirl mothers (?=0.45, p