Basic Education PS John Ololtuaa appears before the National Assembly Committee on Education at Bunge Towers to respond to audit queries for the year ended June 2024, August 27, 2026. /DOUGLAS OKIDDYParliament has questioned the accuracy of learner data used by the government to disburse capitation to schools after the Ministry of Education admitted that the latest allocation was based on field verification data rather than the Kenya Education Management Information System (KEMIS).
The admission by Principal Secretary John Ololtuaa raised concerns before the Public Accounts Committee, with chairperson Tindi Mwale questioning the credibility of the data used to determine the amount schools received.
“This current disbursement that we have done, we actually did not use KEMIS because KEMIS is still being finalised,” the PS said.
KEMIS is the Ministry of Education's digital platform for collecting, managing and linking learner information across the education system.
Each learner is assigned a unique identifier, allowing the ministry to track their progression from Early Childhood Development Education (ECDE) through primary and secondary school to technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions and universities.
The system is designed to curb the registration of ghost learners by making birth certificates mandatory and to prevent the funding of learners who have attained the age of 18.
The ministry plans to roll out KEMIS to replace NEMIS and address weaknesses in the previous system, including fraudulent enrolment data, by linking learner information with records held by agencies such as the Kenya National Examinations Council.
KEMIS was structurally launched in July 2024 and went live in January 2026, but mandatory onboarding of schools to facilitate its use in capitation funding has been delayed by technical challenges.
“So we used the verified data from the field,” Ololtuaa told the committee.
The disclosure prompted MPs to question how the government could determine the amount of capitation required without relying on a fully operational centralised learner database.
The PS appeared before the committee on Thursday to respond to queries raised by Auditor General Nancy Gathungu in her report on the accounts of the State Department for Basic Education for the financial year ended June 2024.
Gathungu flagged capitation payments under the Free Primary Education (FPE), Junior Secondary Education (JSE) and Free Day Secondary Education (FDSE) programmes, saying there was no documentary evidence to confirm that learner data in NEMIS had been verified by the respective subcounty education offices before the funds were released.
The government disbursed Sh63.95 billion for FDSE, Sh30.99 billion for JSE and Sh9.05 billion for FPE based on learner enrolment data captured in NEMIS, according to the audit report.
The concerns over the reliability of learner data come months after an audit exercise released by the ministry in November 2025 revealed massive discrepancies.
The audit, based on data submitted by schools, found that the government had been funding more than 880,000 non-existent learners.
The exercise compared physical headcounts with learner records in NEMIS across public primary, junior and senior schools and found cases where school heads had inflated enrolment figures in the system used by the ministry to determine capitation allocations.
It also established that some non-operational institutions were still receiving capitation funds, costing the government billions of shillings.
The ministry subsequently said it had forwarded the names of implicated headteachers and regional directors to the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) for disciplinary and legal action.
Against this background, the committee said capitation and learner funding required “surgical precision” to ensure transparency and accountability and prevent the loss of public funds.
Ololtuaa, however, maintained that the weaknesses identified in NEMIS had not resulted in evidence of irregular capitation payments.
He said KEMIS would strengthen controls and improve the management of learner data once fully operational.
The committee gave the ministry two weeks to provide evidence of ministerial approval for the decision not to use NEMIS, reports from the subcounty verification exercise and the legal framework guiding the use of field-verified data to determine capitation allocations.
