Symbolic depiction of workplace hierarchy and exploitation
Across Kenya’s workplaces, thousands of attachment students arrive full of hope — and leave having done little more than make tea and run errands. Something is badly wrong.
By Oliver Ogutu
In offices and institutions across the country, attachment students occupy a deeply uncomfortable position: they are called “learners” when it comes to payment and rights, but treated like full employees when it comes to workload and responsibility.
This contradiction sits at the heart of a growing and largely unspoken crisis. Industrial attachment was conceived with a clear and worthy purpose — to bridge the gap between classroom theory and practical experience. Universities and colleges send students to organisations so they can absorb workplace culture, apply what they have learned, and gain professional exposure before graduating. The ideal, as any lecturer will tell you, is that an attachee should be guided, mentored, and supervised. In too many workplaces today, that ideal bears little resemblance to reality.
Many students arrive at their placement offices full of ambition, only to discover that they are expected to perform at the level of permanent staff. They report early, leave late, absorb the full pressure of office life, and sometimes carry responsibilities that stretch well beyond their training. Some are assigned tasks that regular employees quietly avoid. Rather than learning, they become a convenient substitute for underpaid or absent workers — their youth and eagerness quietly weaponised against them.
“Attachment is supposed to help students grow professionally. Yet some organisations have turned it into a business opportunity.”
The situation grows more troubling still when money enters the picture. Some organisations now demand payment from students before accepting them for attachment — “facilitation fees,” “administrative charges,” or simply cash handed over in brown envelopes, all in exchange for a placement. This is, to put it plainly, an ethical scandal. Attachment exists to help young people grow. That some institutions have converted it into a revenue stream deserves far more public outrage than it currently receives.
After paying these fees, many attachees still receive no allowance, no transport support, and no meaningful mentorship. They are expected to deliver results while surviving on their own resources. In some offices, the daily reality amounts to making tea, photocopying documents, running personal errands for senior staff, and performing repetitive tasks that have nothing to do with the course they are studying. Others are quietly deployed to plug staff shortages, with neither recognition nor compensation.
The human cost of this exploitation is real and cumulative. Financially, students struggle to cover transport, food, and accommodation during what are often unpaid weeks or months. Emotionally, many lose confidence after being made to feel invisible or inferior. Academically, the entire purpose of attachment collapses when a student completes the experience having gained no skills relevant to their profession. The stamp in the logbook means everything; what fills the hours behind it often means nothing.
Underneath this lies a broader and more uncomfortable truth about Kenya’s labour market. Some organisations exploit attachment students precisely because they can. Youth unemployment is high, competition for placements is fierce, and students know that complaining risks their placement — or worse, a damaging evaluation from a supervisor with a grudge. So they endure. They smile, they comply, and they say nothing.
It would be unfair, however, to paint every organisation with the same brush. There are companies and institutions that take attachment seriously — that mentor students properly, expose them to genuine professional environments, offer modest allowances, and send them home with real skills and renewed confidence. These organisations understand something the exploitative ones have forgotten: that attachment is not a favour extended to students. It is an investment in the workforce of tomorrow.
Educational institutions carry a responsibility here too. Colleges and universities must do more than simply dispatch students and await their reports. They should regularly evaluate placement centres, act decisively on student feedback, and refuse to send future cohorts to organisations with a record of exploitation. Government and labour authorities, for their part, need to establish clear, enforceable policies that protect attachment students — not guidelines that gather dust, but rules with consequences.
The central question — are attachees employees or learners? — may sound like a legal technicality. It is not. The answer shapes everything: how students are treated, what they are owed, and what they are entitled to demand. They are learners first. They may contribute to the organisations that host them, but their primary purpose is education and professional development. The moment an organisation begins treating them purely as a source of cheap, disposable labour, it has not only failed those students — it has betrayed the very idea of training.
Kenya’s future workforce deserves better than to spend its formative professional years making tea for people who cannot be bothered to teach them anything.
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