colokeba 
The Kenya National Examination Council has raised alarm over Sh3.7 billion budget gap that risks affecting this year’s KCSE exam.
The KCSE exam started on October 21 and will end on November 21.
Knec is now seeking disbursement of Sh3.72 billion deficit, to adequately fund this year’s examination.
Education CS Julius Ogamba said the money will also go a long way in clearing outstanding bills.
Appearing before the National Assembly’s Education Committee, he told MPs the council’s approved recurrent budget this financial year had an allocation of Sh5.9 billion for national assessments and examinations.
From the budget, Sh3 billion was ring-fenced for the KCSE exam administration, Sh2 billion for the Kenya Junior School Education Assessment (KJSEA) and Sh900 million for Kenya Primary School Education Assessment (KPSEA).
“This is against a total requirement of Sh12.72 billion, being Sh8.008 billion for KCSE, Sh3.56 billion for KJSEA, Sh1.062 billion for KPSEA and Sh87.3 million for SBA. The deficit was thus Sh6.8 billion,” Ogamba said.
The ministry had been holding capitation to schools and only releasing cash after a verification process following the damning revelations that some schools and students were non-existent and were still receiving government money.
According to Ogamba, the exercise that concluded this month revealed that 6,041 schools failed the threshold of getting government capitation as they had less students.
The auditor also flagged 990 schools, which failed to submit their data for verification, something the CS noted is raising serious questions of accountability.
“For those schools we released 50 per cent of the allocation to ensure there is no school that is unable to operate during the ongoing exams but we are coming for them to find out why they did not submit data,” the CS said.
