The Ministry of Education has revealed plans to replace the National Education Management Information System (NEMIS) with a new system compatible with the new Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC).
NEMIS was introduced in the year 2017 and has been capturing crucial Biodata for students including learners’ names, Birth Certificate details, disabilities (if any), parent’s contacts and names just to mention but a few. The same system is used when allocating money to public schools to cover tuition and other expenses as provided in the guidelines provided by the government.
According to the Ministry of Education, the current system of education will be done away with because of the requirements of the Competency-based Curriculum (CBC).
NEMIS enables the Ministry of Education to know schools’ enrolment which in turn helps in the termly fee disbursement in schools across the country.
However, the State Department for Implementation of Curriculum Reform PS Fatuma Chege revealed that the system does not help in linking data with the new system of education.
Chege revealed that the government shall spend millions on building a fresh data system to capture accurate data for learners and educational institutions.
“I found issues being raised about NEMIS when I joined the Ministry. We need a new database for our function of monitoring and evaluating learners across the entire system of education,” said Chege.
The Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) gives assessment numbers to monitor learners under the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) while NEMIS provides UPI numbers, which are different to the ones provided by KNEC.
According to Chege, schools now need a new system that will be used in monitoring learners academically from time to time they join the school to university. However, this is not possible with the NEMIS system.
Chege did not reveal how much the system would cost but she hinted at a possible Kshs. 572 million sums are required to fund a number of issues in her office.
“Our funding request was raised to Kshs. 911.90 million. This means we have a deficit of Kshs. 572.60 million,” said Chege.
Besides, Chege revealed that her office is dealing with inadequate funding among other six challenges.
The other challenges she revealed are emergent policy concerns which necessitate the strengthening of collaborations with stakeholders including county governments, and sports and talent development entities.
In addition, she revealed inadequate staffing, weak technical capacities for monitoring and evaluation of curriculum reforms among education management staff and general misinformation about reforms on the curriculum.
However, uncoordinated data sources were the main challenge.
On her part, Kezzia Wandera, the Deputy Director of Quality Assurance and Standards, said that NEMIS only aligns itself to primary and secondary education and does not take care of pre-primary, tertiary and university education.
“We would want a one-stop-shop of data from pre-primary-all the way to tertiary and universities. This is how we shall be able to holistically execute the mandate we have been assigned,” said Wandera.
NEMIS, launched in 2017 when Fred Matiang’I was the Cabinet Secretary for Education will be done away with and more money required to come up with a new system.
The Competency-Based task force report recommended each learner be given a tracking number at Grade 3 after sitting for his or her school-based assessment (SBA).
The tracking number is to be used to monitor learners’ progress as they move to their next levels of education.
“This unique number will be used throughout the learner’s academic life and will be used to track the learner’s performance,” said Chege.
Up to this moment, the Ministry of Education has been trying to implement the use of the NEMIS system for the disbursement of Free Primary Education (FPE) but with little success.
In the 10th of March 2021 circular, the Principal Secretary for Education Julius Jwan said that the government will not use the manual enrollment record of learners in use since the year 2003 because it is prone to errors and that schools should ensure that learners are captured on the NEMIS platform by the 30th of March.
According to PS Jwan, the Directorate of Primary Education intended to change the mode of FPE disbursement to the NEMIS system starting from April 2021.
The Principal Secretary also warned school heads that they are responsible for the data captured on NEMIS.
“Headteachers are responsible for any data regarding their school, this minimizes chances of human error and any changes required are made by the headteacher thus ensuring continuous update of data,” said Jwan.
A similar failed attempt to use NEMIS for disbursement of the FPE was attempted in 2019. The failure was due to many primary schools failing to capture their learners on NEMIS on time.