the problem is there very few journals in Kenya/eastern Africa unlike in Southern Africa ... and no resources to attend conferences to get publications in conference proceedings which are equivalent to half a publication in a refereed journal ... one can also publish in paid refereed journals the fee is btw $100-500... though one can publish at least three articles from his/her masters thesis co there is plenty of new material in a masters thesis

Won't solve any problem.The consultants writing the thesis also publish on behalf of students.

You are calling that scum "consultants"???

Those idiots are totally messing the quality of education in our country. They will do everything for the student at a fee. And they keep resubmitting the same thesis - in the same or different university!!!

And the universities are also to blame. They admit so many students that managing them is a nightmare. Even "The" graduates a thousand plus Masters students in some courses like MBA (The most notorious!). How do you supervise 1500 Masters students in a single department. How many students do you allocate per lecturer? And how do they get to thoroughly interrogate their thesis, processes, data, analysis etc.? And don't forget the same lecturer is teaching at Undergraduate and Postgraduate level and probably has PhD students to supervise not to mention carry over students from other years!!!

In a perfect environment, one lecturer should supervise 3 to 4 masters student at a go and a maximum of 2 PhD students. Sasa unapatia mtu 50 to 60 masters student at ago kwani ni nursery ya kanjo???

Supervisors advise their Masters students to be cautious of predatory publishers as listed by Beall
Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals
Misleading Metrics
Hijacked Journals
Predatory Publishers

Ask someone who did an MBA at University of Nairobi how many students their supervisor was supervising at the same time! And UON is one of the "serious" universities. Go to Universities like Kisii University and things get worse.

Let me talk about Kisii University. These fellows are a joke. A bunch of students took Masters in IT at JKUAT. They completed their course work but could not cope with the stringent requirements for the thesis. Even getting their proposals approved was a problem. Almost all of them got "credit transfer" to Kisii University which did not have a single IT PhD and ultimately graduated. Same Kisii University had 5 PhDs revoked last year!

Strathmore - The Dean IT and some other IT lecturer got a PhD in IT from Strathmore which did not have a single PhD in the department. Who supervised and examined them. Who were in the examination/presentation and post graduate boards?

Don't even get me started on KU offering Engineering courses while they did not have even a single lecturer in the specific disciplines - including the head of departments! The head of department is not even trained in the discipline! I think the Engineering Board of Kenya dealt or tried to deal with that.

I will not talk about the numerous private universities kwasababu hizo ni biashara. Students must pass. Even if they don't pass!!! One of them admits C and D students into a so called pre-university course (9 months) where they do funny units including religious education and pap, they are qualified for admission into Diploma and Degree courses. This is to circumvent the C+ minimum requirement.

CUE have a huge task to restore sanity in the higher education sector.