Recently, the Kenya’s Ministry of Education (MoE), begun a nationwide digital registration exercise for all schools, it’s learners (pupils and students) and staff. The initiative falls under the National Education Management Information System (NEMIS).

NEMIS, which part of the deliverables of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) USD88.4 Million grant, is basically an online portal used for storing education data hence forming a platform to track a school’s and students progress, performance and financial reports since the time of registration or over time.

According the Ministry of Education, Kenyan education data has been and is collected by multiple entities within and outside the Ministry of Education, with each agency or state agency developing and maintaining its own unique data set and this informed the dsign and development a comprehensive Education Data Management Information System.

NEMIS, therefore, is set to become the sole source of accurate and up-to-date data for the Kenyan education system (schools, learners and facilities) as it is “designed to provide quality data that is reliable, relevant, and easily accessible.” and would serve millions of learners in over 120,000 institutions.

The ministry, however, gives a disclaimer to NEMIS users that everyone is liable for any false, inaccurate, inappropriate or incomplete information submitted on the syestem which means that the government relies on the users to give accurate information and the accuracy of the data solely depends on the information providers sincerity.

For the better part of 2017, the Ministry was testing the system. The testing process was carried out in about 600 learning institutions, and was ready for roll out in January 2018 and all schools are expected to have submitted their data, as stipulated by the system, by end of March 2018, a deadline that was extended from February 20 following a low registration turn out.

System Features and Purpose(s)

The official link (URL) to the National Education Management Information System (NEMIS) portal is https://nemis.education.go.ke/ (Use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome browsers for easy access).

NEMIS Modules

The NEMIS comprises four key modules, each of them having sub modules within them. The functions and details of the modules are as captured below.

Institutions Module

This module captures registration and physical aspects of an institution. It achieves this through its six sub modules as presented below.

• Institutions Registration: The purpose of this sub module is to register institution with the Ministry; this will be used by both Existing schools and news schools.
• School infrastructure: It captures equipment and fixed assets in terms of quantity and acquisition date
• School Utility: Captures the utility name and brief description on the utility type.
• Co- Curricula: Captures the co-curricular activities that takes place in institutions, year and the highest level achieved.
• Teaching and learning material: Captures specific quantity of learning materials both the course books and the supplementary books
• Emergency reporting: Enables the school administration to capture any disaster that affects institution.

Learners Module

This module captures every detail necessary from learners beginning from their registration; their performance and progression in the education system; and their transition from one level to another. The learner module has five sub modules as follows:

• Unique Personal Identifier: This module enables the learner to input birth certificate, ID number or Alien number whereupon the system will auto generate a UPI.
• Learner Registration: Captures contact details of the learner.
• Student mobility: Captures details of the learner, mobility type, discharging institution and the new institution.
• Performance Progression: Captures performance details of each learner after completion of specific level e.g. Primary, Secondary etc.
• Learner Talent: Captures details on learner’s talents.

Staff Module

This module captures every detail necessary from members of staff (teaching and non-teaching) beginning from their appointment and mobility within the education sector. The module has five sub modules as follows:

• Teachers and Non-teaching staff registration Module: This interface captures teachers and non-teaching staff personal details in an institution.
• Teacher Mobility: This interface captures transfers of teachers from one institution to the other. It also displays the transfer history of a teacher.
• Teaching areas: This Interface captures subjects/units a teacher is teaching in an institution.
• Study Areas: This interface captures areas a teacher is trained on.
• Teachers’ responsibilities: This interface captures responsibilities assigned to a teacher within an institution.

Finance Module

The finance module helps track income and expenditure in all institutions through its five sub modules.

• Fees: This interface captures the fee amount of an institution with all the approved fee items.
• Capitation: This interface is for setting up the capitation to be disbursed to public Primary and Secondary school in a given term within a calendar year.
• Income Returns: This interface captures all amount received by the Institution within a given in a year.
• Development Fund: It interface captures projects funded in an institution within a given financial year.
• Expenditure Returns: This interface captures the actual amount spent, milestones achieved and the percentage completed in a project.

Password

This interface enables the user to change password whenever they forget the login details.

Reports Module

The reports interface allows the user to generate routine and ad-hoc reports specific to their mandate. This interface will allow export of data for advanced analysis based on prescribed formats (Excel).

NEMIS is expected to enhance:

• Accountability: NEMIS is expected to enable the Ministry to efficiently and transparently allocate resources to learners with a view to enhancing maximum efficiency and value for the Kenyan tax payer. Dis-aggregated learner-level data on educational expenditures will help policy makers establish the equity and efficiency in resource allocation for instance book ratios; pupil teacher ratios etc. It will also help purge ghost children and ensure that capitation allocation is used for intended purposes.
• Proper and Consistent Student/Pupil Identification: NEMIS generates a Unique Personal Identifier (UPI), a unique six-character code that will be used at every stage of the learner’s education for identification and referencing.
• Proper referencing of schools using a School Code: Through NEMIS, each institution of learning will be issued a mandatory unique four-character identifier. The ministry says that any school that will have no unique code shall be deemed not to be existing.
• Informed decision making and planning: NEMIS big-data will be analyzed and then utilized in decision making at all levels of education. Data-driven planning is known to be more effective for an education system as resources are allocated effectively.
• Monitoring and Evaluation: NEMIS is expected to generate education statistics on institutions, enrolment, human resources and physical facilities hence ease in monitoring and evaluation

Target Group: Nemis Users and Big-Data Utilization

This manual is designed for use by education stakeholders, key among them the following groups:

1. Ministry of Education
2. Ministries, Departments, and Agencies
3. Teachers
4. ICT professionals
5. Learners
6. Parents/Guardians
7. Development Partners
8. Kenya Primary School Heads Association
9. Kenya Secondary School Heads Association
10. National Secondary School Association
11. Kenya Private School Association

System Specifications

To effectively access the NEMIS portal, the following specifications have been identified as the minimum requirements.

i) Hardware: 2.4 GHz processor; 1 Gigabyte of Random Access Memory (RAM) for Windows Vista and higher Operating System (OS); 120 Gigabyte available hard disk space.

ii) Software: The system is compatible with all Operating Systems e.g. Windows7, Windows 10, iOS (Apple), Android among others. Internet browsers including internet explorer, Safari, Opera Mini, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, among others can be used in accessing the system. You will need applications such as Microsoft Office, Open office among others available in the market to access outputs of the system.

iii) Network Connectivity: Broadband connectivity at least 3G with 2 Megabytes per second (mbps) speed on dedicated links.

iv) Other Devices: To ensure full interaction with the system and specifically the data capture, users are advised to have a digital camera for capturing the images of learners. Other complimentary and support devices will include a LaserJet printer, laptops, desktop computers, tablets or smartphones, or tablets.

To IT Services providers whose clientele is the education sector, especially schools, they perceive that this would trigger a huge decline on the demand for processes automation softwares in learning institutions.

Based on the insights above, however, it is clear that NEMIS does not cater for all the automation a learning institution requires; both public and private schools.

Having an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software for schools or colleges, therefore, would help fill the gaps of streamlining and simplifying admission of students, managing of finances, procurement, exam processing, human resourse (HR), library and transport management.