In a particularly memorable recent episode of Machachari, a popular television show on Citizen TV, Baha battles with a problem at school that would trouble most 11-year olds in Nairobi’s sprawling and filthy slums.

It is school opening day and Baha, the child of a vegetable seller and one of the millions of children who are now enjoying free primary school in Kenya, has some bad news.

His schoolteacher has informed him that he will be repeating standard six.

He spends most of the day hatching a silly plot that would get the character named MaDVD, who is in the toilet-for-rent business, negotiate a social promotion for him to standard six.

It all ends in a dramatic confrontation, where he informs his mother, teacher and the headmaster that he will not repeat the class.

If only this were true only on television. But as it has emerged in the first two weeks of January and the beginning of the school year, similar scenes are being played out in thousands of classrooms in East Africa.

It is now heading to a decade since most governments in East Africa started offering free schooling in a bid to expand education to the poor, who need it to escape the traps of poverty.

However, with the East African Community governments and donors having spent over $16 billion on education, the big question of the day is, what has been the outcome as measured by the quality of graduates we are producing at primary school level in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania?

Ideally, students out of these school systems should be on the way to participating in the increasingly connected global economy as knowledge workers.

There are 30 million children of school-going age (primary and secondary) in East Africa.

To measure quality, we examined the level of learning ability that a 10-year-old such as Baha would be expected to have anywhere in the world in mathematics and reading.

We also looked at the data maintained by Unicef on class repetition rates throughout the region.

Over the past decade, the answers to this question have become more readily available under the Southern African Consortium on Measuring Educational Quality (Sacmeq), a collaborative effort among 16 African countries.

Two studies have been done in 2000 and 2007 under Sacmeq. Uwezo, an NGO, last year also did some ground breaking studies in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Under both studies, a disturbing picture emerges of millions of potential knowledge workers who could have helped accelerate economic growth in EAC, who are just not going to make it as skilled workers.

Under both Sacmeq and Uwezo, it is clear that while the focus on increasing access and participation in education is largely working, there is an urgent need to address quality.

Reading and numeracy levels, which are proxy for literacy, are alarmingly low in East Africa.

Less than one per cent attain critical and abstract thinking skills among primary school pupils in the region and the majority of children do not gain even Standard 2 level skills until they are almost finished with primary school. Many never learn these skills at all.

Picture this, Uwezo’s study found that nearly 10 per cent or 75,000 of the 746,000 children who sat for the standardised test offered to 13-year-olds in Kenya at level 8 could not do a typical long division mathematics problem expected of a seven-year old in Standard 2.

Only 1.4 per cent of Kenyan boys and girls could solve advanced math problems expected at this level.

In Uganda, 15 per cent of the pupils at Standard 7 could not do Standard 2 math.

And in Tanzania, a third of the students faced the same fate.

Less than one per cent of students are performing at the advanced level in math proficiency for the region, compared with 28 per cent in Taiwan and over 20 per cent in Hong Kong, Korea and Finland.

When it comes to reading English (the global language of commerce), 4.3 per cent or 32,000 of the children who took Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) could not read English at Standard 2 level, which means reading a full sentence. Nearly 6.4 per cent were at advanced level.

In Uganda, 28 per cent of the primary school graduates were not reading at Standard 2 level, and only 0.5 per cent were at advanced levels.

In Tanzania, nearly half of all primary school graduates could not read a sentence that a seven-year old would not be expected to have trouble with.

This data reveals the main cracks that have continued to divide EAC states: with Kenya accounting for 75 per cent of East Africa’s total education spending, it is easy to understand why the school system will continue to favour Kenya as a supplier of managerial labour to the region.

The latest Sacmeq study uses Standard 6 pupils as the sample population in the region.

The test is conducted in the language of instruction at Standard 6, which is English for all countries involved except Tanzania and Mozambique, which use Kiswahili and Portuguese, respectively.

Data collected show that only 5.5 per cent of pupils have a mastery of Standard 6 mathematical skills — which is the minimum required at that level; and only a tiny proportion of pupils (1.2 per cent) are capable of abstract problem solving.

The regional leaders in mathematical skills are Mauritius, Seychelles and Kenya, all of which record above 10 per cent of Standard 6 pupils being considered mathematically skilled — able to solve multiple-operation problems using the correct order of arithmetic operations involving fractions, ratios, and decimals; to translate verbal and graphic representation information into symbolic, algebraic, and equation form in order to solve a given mathematical problem; and able to check and estimate answers using external knowledge, not provided within the problem.

Slightly more than 1 per cent of pupils in these countries are capable of abstract problem solving, that is, able to identify the nature of an unstated mathematical problem embedded within verbal or graphic information and then translate this into symbolic, algebraic, or equation form in order to solve the problem.

The proportion of Kenyan Standard 6 pupils capable of abstract problem solving is 1.4 per cent. Tanzania is at 1 per cent; and Uganda at only 0.1 per cent.

Mauritius, Seychelles and Kenya, again, lead the wider Southern African region in reading skills, according to Sacmeq — a full 16.2 per cent of grade 6 Seychellois children are capable of critical reading: that is, they can locate information in longer narrative texts by reading on and reading back in order to combine information from various parts of the text to infer and evaluate what the writer has assumed about both the topic and the characteristics of the reader — such as age, knowledge, and personal beliefs.

The proportion of Kenyan Standard 6 children reading at critical level stands at 6.4 per cent, Tanzania 6.2 per cent (reading in Kiswahili), and Uganda 0.5 per cent.

Repetition rates in East African primary schools are also high, according to data collected by the World Bank: Burundi’s repetition rates are far higher than the regional rate, and indeed of the world, standing at a distressing 34 per cent average for 2004-2008.

This means that a full third of Burundian children are enrolled in the same grade as in the previous year, as a proportion of all children enrolled.

Rwanda’s repetition rates for the same period is 16 per cent, Uganda 13.1 per cent, Kenya 5.8 per cent and Tanzania 5 per cent.

These repetition rates could be a result of two factors: first, that teachers are genuinely convinced that a pupil has not mastered what is required for that level, and are forced to hold back that pupil.

On the other hand, and as has been reported in Kenyan schools, head teachers have been known to hold back supposedly “weak” candidates simply because they do not want their school’s mean score to be lowered in national examinations.

Nevertheless, perhaps more not less, East African children need to repeat classes in lower primary, if three studies carried out by Uwezo are anything to go by.

Children in East Africa aged 5-16 were assessed in three key areas: Kiswahili literacy, English literacy, and numeracy.

Their reading skills were evaluated using an incremental method that had four levels — letter, word, paragraph and story — with each stage serving as the pre-requisite for the next.

According to Uwezo’s report, in Kenya, for instance, only four out of 10 grade two pupils can read a simple five-word English sentence to the end.

The majority can read only words and syllables, which are ideally Standard 1 level skills.

A quarter of Standard 5 pupils cannot read a simple paragraph set at a Standard 2 difficulty level.

In Uganda, 98 per cent of P3 children sampled could not read and understand a story text of P2 level difficulty, and 80 per cent could not solve at least two numerical written division sums of P2 level difficulty correctly.

By the time pupils reached P7, a troubling 28 per cent of them could not read and understand a P2 story text.

In Tanzania, one in five primary school leavers cannot read Standard 2 level Kiswahili, and half of all children still cannot read a Standard 2 level English story by the time they complete primary school.

The mastery of English among pupils is particularly dismal in Tanzania: even though all children in Standard 3 should be able to read the Standard 2 story level, less than 1 in 10 (7.7 per cent) can.

Progress in English is slow; by Standard 5, only a quarter of the children can read a story. Nearly half cannot even read short English words.

Many children reach Standard 7 without any English skill at all. By the time they complete primary school, half of all children (49.1 per cent) still cannot read a Standard 2 level English story, and far fewer are likely to be able to read at the Standard 7 level.

This means that the vast majority of children who enter secondary schooling are unable to read in English, the medium of instruction.

Even though Kiswahili is the national language widely spoken across Tanzania, a large number of children are not able to read it fluently.

Most children do not learn to read a simple story until Standard 5 or 6.

By the time they complete primary school, one out of every five children still cannot read the Standard 2 level story.

These children will likely never learn to read, and despite spending seven years in primary school, they will probably remain illiterate for life.

In mathematics, numerical skills of East African children are wanting: Four out every five (79.7 per cent) of Ugandan children sampled in class P3 could not solve at least two numerical written division sums of P2 level difficulty correctly.

This number climbed to 85 per cent by the time the pupils reach P7, meaning that 15 per cent of primary school leavers in Uganda cannot do mathematics of P2 difficulty.

According to Uwezo, although multiplication is in the Standard 2 curriculum, hardly any Tanzanian Standard 2 child can multiply — more than half of them cannot even add.

By the time they reach Standard 5, most children can add and subtract, but the majority still cannot multiply.

Three out of 10 children in Standard 7 cannot do Standard 2 level multiplication.

One in 10 children complete primary school with no mathematics skills at all; they cannot even do basic addition.

This means the majority of children entering secondary school do not have an adequate foundation in mathematics that is essential for learning and analysis, particularly in science and commerce.

The scenario in Kenya is also disquieting: only half of the children from class 1 to 8 have the highest numeracy competency expected at Standard 2, that is, doing division work.

Half of Standard 2 children cannot do simple subtraction tasks, implying that they are not equipped with the minimum competencies of their class level.