About two million primary school learners have not been captured in the Kenya Education Management Information System, leaving them outside the count the government uses to send capitation to schools.
Fredrick Mujumba, the Director of Education in charge of KEMIS, said 5.05 million primary learners had been registered against a projected 7.2 million in public and private primary schools. He gave a gender breakdown of 2,615,822 boys and 2,442,600 girls, which the ministry put at 5,050,422.
The ministry has finished registering learning institutions, but Mujumba said some schools sit on the system with no learners attached to them at all.
That gap carries a direct financial consequence. Nelson Sifuna, who heads the Directorate of Field Coordination and Co-curricular Activities, warned that schools which fail to register all their learners will not receive government funding for the children missing from the database. He said allocations are calculated from the number of learners captured in the system, and that complaints about capitation can only be addressed once those learners are registered.
The warning responds to a practical complaint. School heads have raised concerns about capitation not reaching them, and the ministry’s position is that unregistered learners cannot be funded.
Stephen Barongo, who leads the Directorate of Primary Education, said the ministry has dropped the requirement for a birth certificate before a learner’s details can be entered into KEMIS, removing one documented barrier to registration.
For junior schools, Mujumba reported 1,637,561 boys and 1,546,334 girls, a combined enrolment of roughly 3.18 million. Senior schools had 1,644,077 boys and 1,615,829 girls, a total of 3,259,906 against an expected 3.5 million.
Kenya began moving from the older NEMIS platform to KEMIS in 2024. Mujumba said the ministry is building a learner registry and intends to add a human resource registry alongside its other databases.
The registration figures were presented during the Kenya Comprehensive School Heads Association annual conference, held at the Sheikh Zayed Children Welfare Centre in Bombolulu, Nyali subcounty, Mombasa, and attended by more than 15,000 school administrators.
Schools still holding unregistered learners have not been given a specific cut-off date by the ministry.
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