Recent revelations made before Senators show that delays in the disbursement of funds to secondary schools is linked to delays in registration to the National Education Management Information System (NEMIS).
NEMIS is an online portal for managing and automating education data and other related administrative functions.
Appearing before Senate plenary, Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu pointed out that some secondary schools were locked out from the government disbursement since they were not fully registered.
“When these schools were not captured in NEMIS, it meant that they were not able to benefit from capitation,” said Machogu.
Public learning institution are only funded depending on the number of learners fully registered in the government data bank.
Machogu said the Ministry of Education has moved to fast track the registration of schools by de-centralizing the approval process of registration which was domained at MOH headquarters.
Approval for NEMIS registration will now be designated at the county level which has managed to reduce the backlog of unregistered learning institution and learners in the biometric system.
“We have to expeditiously work so that we can be able to register these schools so that they can be able to benefit from these capitations,” Machogu stated.
More than 200,000 secondary school students have not been receiving government funding despite attending classes and even feeding.
Last month, Machogu outlined that 212,300 learners in secondary schools have not been receiving capitation despite attending classes.
Machogu told senators that some students were missing birth certificates are missing, hence incomplete registration of students’ data in the government system.
There exist thousands of students carried by the weight of those who receive capitation which leads to financial crises in schools.
Learners are feeding and using resources courtesy of other learners whose data have been captured and receiving government capitation.
For Primary schools, the disbursement of the capitation to school has been made based on manually collected and collated data from schools through Ministry’s field officers.
Starting this financial quarter, primary schools will be required to upload details of their data on NEMIS before any disbursement of data is made. BY CAPITAL NEWS