From 253 KCPE Marks to Earning PhD Abroad: Inspiring Journey of Tahira Mohamed
Tahira Mohamed, who scored only 252 marks in the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exam, has become one of the youngest PhD holders in Kenya.
Tahira’s journey to becoming a PhD holder is a testament to her determination, resilience, and the importance of education in transforming lives.
On January 25, 2023, the mother of three graduated from the University of Sussex, Brighton, one of the best in development studies, with a PhD degree.
She was born in Moyale in Marsabit County, as the fifth child in a family of two boys and seven girls. Her father was mentally disabled, making her mother the only breadwinner, and she had to work alongside her mother for the family’s sustenance from childhood.
“As a young girl, I would come home from school and help my mum sell incense, which she was making at home so that we could get something for food,” she told Standard.
When she finished KCPE, she was about to repeat Class Eight since she had no means to join high school, but she learned that she could study using bursaries and joined Moyale Girls Secondary School.
Unfortunately, the bursaries were not enough and she had to drop out of school in Form Two for a year. However, her sister in university came through later, using her HELB loan to take her to Form Three at Trikha Girls Secondary School in Thika.
Despite missing a huge chunk of schooling, her determination saw her score B+ and she eventually graduated from the University of Nairobi with a first-class honours degree in Anthropology with a GPA of 74.0, topping the class in 2016.
Her success earned her a full scholarship from the university, where she enrolled for her Masters of Art in International Studies at the Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies.
Her master’s project was on human smuggling across the Kenya-Ethiopia border, and she had to cross the borders, go to police stations, find the smuggled people, the brokers, and do the very sensitive interviews.
Despite the sensitive nature of her project, she succeeded and later joined the University of Sussex for her PhD, which she completed in three years.
Her PhD research was based at the Institute of Development Studies in the university under the Pastres Project, which teaches pastoralists how to manage different vices like drought, animal disease, and conflict.
The project is based in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tunisia, Italy, China, and India, and after interviews, she was the only Kenyan selected.
Her thesis was on ‘The role of the moral economy in response to uncertainty among the pastoralists of Northern Kenya’, and she studied how pastoralists in Isiolo have gone through different forms of crises like drought, animal disease, and conflict for the past 45 years – from 1975 to 2020.
She looked at what activities they were doing and specifically what social relationships, solidarities, moral economies, have helped, and how the connection in the society, that network, that neighborliness between people in managing crises has also helped people survive.
Mohamed plans to build on the project to help her community and understand how local networks should be combined with external support like humanitarian aid to sustain their livelihood.
“I will continue studying and researching because most of the time the projects which are implemented in these pastoral areas are designed from the outside and don’t consider local perspectives.“ She says.
She wants to combine what they have been doing for the last 45 years with intervention so that they can understand where they have gone wrong.
From 253 KCPE Marks to Earning PhD Abroad: Inspiring Journey of Tahira Mohamed
