5,000 schools yet to get capitation as closing date nears

Thousands of public schools across the country are inching toward the end of the third term without receiving a coin in capitation funding.

This even as the Ministry of Education continues with an audit to weed out ‘ghost” students and schools.

With barely a week left before schools break for the December holidays, about 5,000 schools are yet to receive any funding. 

Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Ogamba told MPs on Wednesday that only 39,000 of the 44,000 schools in the country have so far been cleared and funded.

The audit, which began when schools reopened, was initially meant to take two weeks. 

However, it has now stretched into its seventh week, forcing many institutions to operate without money for operations, exam preparations, utilities, and feeding programmes.

On Wednesday, Ogamba admitted the delay, as the ministry seeks to weed out inflated enrolment data and non-existent schools from receiving capitation.

“The Auditor General undertook a forensic audit of the schools. There was an indication that there are ghost schools and ghost students. So we decided as a ministry to undertake the verification exercise, and it is true that we weighed the decision to undertake the exercise vis-à-vis the release of the capitation,” Ogamba told the National Assembly on Wednesday when appearing before the house to respond to questions from MPs.

The CS has asked Parliament for an extra week to finish the verification. This means that the verification exercise will last for eight weeks.

“By next Wednesday, I will be receiving the report on verification,” Ogamba said. 

With schools set to close for the third term on October 24, it means the institutions will get the funds in the last week of the term.

Emuhaya MP, Omboko Milemba, had questioned the progress of the release of capitation funds to schools, raising concern that schools are struggling to meet operational costs.

Milemba, who also doubles up as the Kenya Union of Post-Primary Education Teachers(KUPPET) chairman, also sought to establish why the ministry is releasing only a portion of the stipulated capitation funding to schools.

In his response, the CS admitted that the ministry had underestimated the timeline, initially projecting a two-week audit that had now dragged on for two months.

“We had calculated that it would take two weeks, but it took slightly longer. However, the decision we made in order to mitigate the challenges that the schools are going through was that every single day, once we conclude the verification exercise for a particular school, which we confirm exists and has the correct number of students, disbursement for those resources to those schools was released,” Ogamba said.

Parliament is now pushing the ministry to fast-track disbursements and publish a list of all verified schools to ensure accountability. 

The CS said that so far, 97 per cent of secondary schools have been funded due to the upcoming national examinations, but the overall verification stands at 84 per cent.

“We are working day and night to ensure that in the next one week, by Wednesday next week, we will have completed this exercise,” he said.

The ministry insists the audit is essential to fix a chronic problem that has plagued the sector for years, of inaccurate data on enrolment and institutions leading to the loss of billions of shillings and persistent budget cuts by the Treasury.

“The capitation we give is based on student numbers — Sh1,420 for primary, Sh15,000 for junior schools, and Sh22,000 for secondary schools. When we do not have the correct number, it becomes a budgeting issue. Treasury can slash the amount by 10 or 20 per cent because the numbers are unverifiable,” Ogamba explained.

The ministry is also using the exercise to clean up data ahead of a migration from the current NEMIS system to a new digital platform, KEMIS.

“If the data in NEMIS were incorrect, we would have transferred the incorrect data to the new system and would not have resolved the problem. Yes, for this third term, maybe for two or three weeks we will have a problem, but going into the future we will have resolved the question of numbers, capitation and delays,” the CS said.

While the ministry argues the clean-up is necessary, the decision has left schools stranded and scrambling to stay afloat. 

Heads say the delays have disrupted exam preparations, halted infrastructure projects, and forced some institutions to rely on parents’ contributions to keep operations going.