Court Orders Separated Parents to Share Child Support Equally

In a Bungoma courtroom in late August, a magistrate settled a dispute that had left three children caught between their parents' competing claims about who should pay for their lives. The mother had asked the court to order the father—a Kenya Defence Forces officer—to shoulder the entire financial burden of raising their three children. She said she had been doing it alone despite his employment. The father countered that he was already meeting their needs and providing medical coverage through his military insurance. The magistrate, T.O. Omono, rejected the mother's request entirely.

The ruling turned on a single, straightforward finding: both parents earned nearly the same amount of money each month. The mother's net salary was approximately 27,669 shillings monthly. The father's KDF compensation, after expenses and other obligations, was comparable. Given that equivalence, Magistrate Omono wrote, the mother could not reasonably demand that the father maintain the children alone. The law, he noted, required both parents to provide for their children. The court ordered them to split equally the costs of food, clothing, medical care, and all other upkeep expenses.

The school fees dispute revealed a deeper tension. The father had previously paid for the children's education in public schools. The mother then moved them to different institutions, including a private school, without his agreement. The father offered to continue paying what he had been paying before—the fees at the public schools he could afford. The magistrate declined to force him to pay for schools he had not chosen, but also refused to leave the mother bearing the entire cost of the new arrangements. Until the end of the current academic year, both parents will share school fees and related expenses equally. After that, they must agree on schools the father can afford. If they cannot agree, he will pay what he previously spent on public school fees, and the mother will cover any additional costs.

The court also addressed where the three children—identified in the ruling as EW, SI, and AJ—would live. One child was staying with paternal relatives; the other two were with their maternal grandmother. The children had appeared before the court in June and expressed their preferences about where they wanted to be. The magistrate found that the parents' work locations and schedules made it impractical for either to have all three children in their physical care. The existing living arrangements would remain unchanged pending the full resolution of the case.

Yet the court granted both parents equal legal custody, meaning both must have a voice in major decisions about the children's education, religion, and medical care. This separated physical custody—where the children actually live—from legal custody, the right to participate in significant choices about their upbringing. The mother's lawyers had filed the application using provisions from a repealed law, a technical error that could have derailed the case entirely. The magistrate acknowledged the mistake but refused to dismiss the application, reasoning that striking it down would leave the children's basic needs unresolved while a corrected application made its way through the courts. Each parent will bear their own legal costs.

The ruling reflects a shift in how Kenyan family courts approach separated parents with similar financial capacity. The magistrate's language was direct: a parent cannot demand that the other parent alone maintain children when both are earning comparable incomes. The decision leaves the parents with shared financial responsibility and shared decision-making authority, while the children remain in the living arrangements they already know. What happens when the academic year ends—whether the parents can agree on schools, whether the financial arrangements hold, whether the full custody case proceeds smoothly—remains to be seen.