How Internship Fees Are Crushing Kenyan Dreams

Internships and attachments are meant to fill in the theory-practice disconnect, and are a way for students to gain hands-on experience in their fields of study.

In Kenya, however, this necessary rite of passage has been commodified and made a money-making venture for industries at the expense of students and their families. It is time industries did away with attachment fees and stopped profiting from the youths' desperation for experience.

For the most part, universities already require students to pay an attachment registration fee as part of their academic necessity. This is usually included in the tuition fee schedule every academic year.

One would believe this covers the administrative cost of supervision, assessment, and certification. But incredibly, most corporations and industries still ask for attachment fees from students, effectively making them pay twice for the identical opportunity.

The argument that companies need the funds to cover supervision or paperwork doesn't compute. These industries already benefit from student interns, who in many cases perform valuable work without any form of payment.

Whether it's running errands or working full-time in newsrooms, hospitals, law firms, and government agencies, interns are often plugging staffing holes at no cost to the company. Charging them on top of that is unjustified and exploitative.

This double financial strain unfairly stretches both the students and their parents. With the high costs of living and tuition fees in Kenyan universities, most families cannot afford to keep their children in school.

Charging an extra attachment fee outside the institution not only biases students from impoverished backgrounds but further deepens class inequalities in access to opportunities.

Further, the majority of students are forced to go long distances for attachments due to the limited local opportunities, paying transportation and accommodation charges. Asking them to pay a company for a chance to work — largely without any compensation — is an insult to their commitment and ambition.

If Kenyan businesses are serious about nurturing youthful talent and building a sustainable workforce, they must stop viewing attachment programs as money-making ventures.

The Ministry of Education and regulatory agencies should step in and issue unequivocal policy against businesses charging attachment fees.

Students deserve decent, accessible, and empowering entrance into the job market — not commercial roadblocks disguised as administrative fees. Time to break this exploitative culture and restore dignity to industrial attachments in Kenya.