Conger

St. Paul’s United Theological College in Limeru, the Anglican Church of Kenya’s leading clergy training college, has been granted a university charter in a Sept 14 ceremony led by Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki.

The new institution will be named St. Paul’s University. World Council of Churches (WCC) General Secretary the Rev. Samuel Kobia, a St. Paul’s alumnus, was named Chancellor.The promotion of St. Paul’s to the University level is part of a government programme to increase places for qualified students. President Kibaki stated his government would build ten new university campuses and increase first year admissions in public universities from 10,000 to 16,000 students per year.

Between 2005 and 2006, a total of 131,000 students qualified for university admission, but only 36,000 were able to obtain admission to local universities, the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation reported.

“A great deal of planning, resource mobilization and long hours of work” had been invested in meeting the accreditation requirements for St. Paul’s, he noted, praising the school for broadening its curriculum to include business and communications studies, and encouraged it to add faculties of engineering and science.His government sought to raise in a single generation an educated and prosperous society, President Kibaki said. By 2030 he hoped that all Kenyans would have access to 14 years of publicly funded education. St. Paul’s expansion was essential in meeting this goal, he said.

“We have made the first step. We have attained the goal of 8 years of free primary education. We aim to achieve the pre-school education goals in the next two years. We are also progressively moving towards elimination of all fees charged by public secondary schools,” he said.

Founded as St. Paul’s Divinity School in 1903 by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Freretown, Mombasa, the school moved to its present site in 1930 in Limuru. In 1955 the Divinity School changed its name to St. Paul’s United Theological College after the Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist Churches combined their clergy training colleges into a single institution.