Grade 9 Pupils at Fairfield Primary School, Mombasa, during a lesson in class.
The government may not know the exact number of learners in public and private schools after revelations that the National Education Management Information System (Nemis), which the Ministry of Education has been using to capture the data of learners, was manipulated, with some learners’ details erased.
The revelations, which impacts the management of capitation funds in schools, came as Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu flagged the ownership of Nemis in the audit report on the accounts of the State Department for Basic Education for the 2022/23 financial year currently under consideration before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the National Assembly.
Although Basic Education Principal Secretary Julius Bitok, while appearing before PAC claimed that 12.6 million is the current number of learners in primary, junior and secondary schools, the disclosures by Mr Fredrick Mujumba, a senior official at the State Department for Basic Education, say something else.
Mr Mujumba, the head of Kenya Education Management Information System (Kemis) that is replacing Nemis, told PAC, chaired by Butere MP Tindi Mwale, that manipulation of Nemis through deletion of learners’ data from the system may have compromised the correct data of learners in schools.
“We have noticed that some of these learners have been deleted from various points, just not necessarily at the school level. You even get some cases where a cyber cafe has removed learners because they were not paid for the work that they did,” Mr Mujumba told the committee.
The Nemis system weaknesses were flagged by the Auditor-General as it emerged that the government spent Sh239.8 million to reengineer the system under the Primary Education Development (PRIEDE) project.
According to the audit report, the scope of the works for Nemis strengthening entailed the installation of one of the servers at a secondary site on an existing government cloud infrastructure.
This was to enable the server to harness the existing resources of the Government cloud, such as processing and storage capabilities, load balancing, intelligent system monitoring, system scalability, data security and business continuity.
The secondary site runs on VMware as the virtualisation software and CISCO or DELL servers.
But PS Bitok assured the MPs that the government has the correct data of learners in schools, even as PAC members raised doubts as they pushed for an audit.
“We know the number of learners because we have them,” the PS said, adding that the migration to Kemis was informed by the recommendations of the Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms, chaired by Prof Raphael Munavu.
The PS did not reveal how much it will cost the country to migrate to the new system despite interventions from PAC members.
Learners from St Teresia Preparatory School Ngemwa in Kiambu County peruse a newspaper with a model CBC KPSEA examination.
He nonetheless went ahead to state that the 12.6 million learners in schools are distributed such that 6.4 million are in primary schools, 3.3 million in senior secondary schools and 2.9 million in Junior Secondary Schools (JSS).
Mr Mujumba spoke after PAC members Dr Wilberforce Ojiambo (Funyula) and Nabii Nabwera (Lugari) questioned the integrity of the data of learners captured by the Ministry of Education.
“The State Department does not know the number of learners in schools in the country,” said Dr Ojiambo, with Mr Nabwera saying that manipulation of Nemis is the biggest danger in the management of capitation.
“Nemis has become the channel for siphoning of funds. Principals of schools have alluded to it that by the close of business of the day, a school may, for instance, have 300 learners in the system. But when they checked the following day, the number was reduced to 100,” said Mr Nabwera.
This is notwithstanding that the government allocates and disburses capitation funds to public schools based on the data captured by learners in the Nemis.
Mr Mujumba further revealed that the ministry noticed that “our schools quite shared their credentials to the system with many others, either teachers or cyber cafe attendants and some of the cases we have handled.”
“So, they were thinking that by deleting the names of learners, they were punishing the schools,” said Mr Mujumba.
The Kemis director told the committee that the upgrade of the system to Kemis will address the manipulation challenges that Nemis has been prone to.
“Those are some of the things that do come, and there are things that we want to address through this new KEMIS system, so that we have a clear identity of the learner, not done by ourselves, but by the people who know how to identify this number,” he said.
But even as the integrity of Nemis data came into sharp focus, the Auditor-General accused the State Department of not providing, for audit purposes, the ownership documents of the reengineered Nemis.
The documents that the auditors were looking at included the copyright registration and reservation in accordance with the Copyright Act of 2001.
Section 22 of the Act states that the board shall keep and maintain a register of all works in such manner as may be prescribed.
Reengineered Nemis
The law also states that all works eligible for copyright may be entered on the register on application in the prescribed format made by or on behalf of the author, owner, assignee or exclusive licensee of the work.
It further states that the register “shall be prima facie evidence of particulars entered therein” and documents, extracts or copies made therefrom, if certified by the board, shall be admissible in evidence without further proof or production of the original.
“The register and the relevant details entered on application shall be available for search to the public on terms set by the board,” the law says.
Also required were the signed handover documents that include an instruction booklet explaining each functionality to the users of Nemis.
The auditors were also seeking the test environment confirmation indicating that issues “pertaining” to processing and storage capabilities, load balancing, intelligent system monitoring, system scalability, data security and business continuity have been addressed and resolved by the reengineered Nemis.
“The documentation relating to the development of reengineered Nemis and the structure of its administration, highlighting the officers who hold different tasks and roles in the development, maintenance, administration, compliance and control of the Nemis system was not provided for audit,” the audit states.
