A high-stakes legal challenge has been launched at the Employment and Labour Relations Court in Nyeri, asking for immediate reinstatement of 18 female police recruits who were expelled from the National Police College, Kiganjo, just because they were pregnant.
The petition, filed by Peter Agoro and John Wangai, signals a bigger, more tense step in the fight against what some advocates describe as unfair administrative habits within the National Police Service (NPS).
The 18 women, who were among the roughly 10,000 recruits chosen during the countrywide exercise in November 2025, ended up out of the service shortly after they reported to the Kiganjo campus. Mandatory pregnancy tests carried out on arrival led to their instant removal, and this is what the petitioners say is unconstitutional and has no real legal basis.
From what is stated in the court filings, the respondents — including the Inspector General of the National Police Service, the National Police Service Commission (NPSC), and the Attorney General — did not point to any exact, properly gazetted policy that orders the automatic dismissal of recruits on account of pregnancy.
The petitioners argue that the recruits were already expecting before joining the training program and that they did not conceive while they were in the college.
“The blanket use of pregnancy as an automatic disqualifier for female police recruits is discriminatory in plain view,” the petition states. It also notes that no matching punishment is applied to male recruits in similar biological circumstances, adding that the approach breaches constitutional safeguards around gender non-discrimination, human dignity, and the right to fair labor practices.
The petition suit faults the NPS for not looking into less drastic options, like the deferment of training or even granting temporary leave, which might have enabled the women to get back to the academy after postpartum recovery.
Instead of considering these routes properly, dismissing them outright, the petitioners say, shows the service has breached the recruits’ reasonable expectations after they cleared every stage of a competitive recruitment process.
Now the petitioners are asking the court to declare the dismissals unlawful and also to order the NPSC to craft a humane, non-discriminatory policy framework for managing pregnancy during recruitment and training.
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