Read the policy documents from a county education office in Kakamega or Kisumu and you would be forgiven for thinking the digital classroom is already here. Kenya Vision 2030, the National Broadband Strategy, the Digital Literacy Programme, the Kenya National Digital Master Plan 2022–2032 — the paperwork is genuinely impressive.

The reality on the ground is more uneven. Some schools run a full M-Pesa STK-push fee desk and parent SMS portals. Others still mark a manual register at 7:30am because the only working laptop is locked in the deputy's drawer. This is a sober survey of where ICT integration in Kenyan schools actually stands in 2026 — and what the gaps tell us about the next five years.

The policy stack: ambitious, mostly on paper

Kenya's Vision 2030 names ICT as one of the enabling foundations of the Economic Pillar, with explicit commitments to integrate ICT into teaching at every level (Kenya Vision 2030, 2025). The Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy continues to operate the Digital Literacy Programme (DLP), launched in 2016, which targets every public primary school (MoICDE, 2025).

By the most recent government count, the DLP has put over 1.2 million devices into 21,638 public primary schools and trained around 331,000 teachers (Kenya News Agency, 2024). Real progress — but less than the original promise that every Standard 1 pupil would receive a laptop. The second phase, "Using to Learn", shifted emphasis from device distribution to shared digital learning centres (UNESCO, 2024).

NEMIS is dying; KEMIS is being born

Anyone who has wrestled with the National Education Management Information System (NEMIS) since 2017 will not mourn its passing. The Ministry of Education has confirmed that NEMIS is being replaced by the Kenya Education Management Information System (KEMIS), with piloting from July 2025 and a planned full transition before the end of 2025 (Citizen Digital, 2025).

NEMIS was launched in 2017 to digitise admissions, capitation disbursement and exam registration, but has struggled with incomplete coverage, unreliable data and weak integration with other government services (Techweez, 2025). KEMIS promises a Unique Personal Identifier (UPI) assigned at birth and linked to the national civil registry — a non-trivial architectural shift. The early signs are encouraging; the political risk is real, with critics already framing KEMIS as "tenders in new clothing" (Tech-ish, 2025).

Broadband: closer than ever, not yet universal

Kenya's National Optic Fibre Backbone Infrastructure (NOFBI) now reaches all 47 county headquarters and is expanding through 290 sub-county headquarters under Phase 2E (Kenya Vision 2030, 2025). The government laid an additional 4,690 km of fibre in 2025, bringing the national network past 13,590 km (Eastleigh Voice, 2025). The stated target is to connect every school by 2030 under the National Broadband Strategy.

For schools specifically, the Communications Authority's Education Broadband Connectivity Project has connected 884 secondary schools across the 47 counties to 5 Mbps internet, with another 754 institutions in the 2025 pipeline — 377 of them in Western Kenya (128 Kakamega, 116 Bungoma, 81 Busia, 52 Vihiga) (Communications Authority of Kenya, 2025). National internet penetration stood at 48.0% of the population at the start of 2025, with 27.4 million users (DataReportal, 2025).

What that headline number hides: a 2019 World Bank estimate put rural Kenyan internet access at 17%, less than half the urban figure of 44% (World Bank, 2019). The 2025 number is better, but the rural-urban gap remains the single biggest constraint on whole-school ICT.

The data: how many schools, how many learners

The numbers worth keeping in your head: 93,988 schools nationwide in 2023, of which 35,570 are primary and 10,752 are secondary (KNBS, 2025). Secondary enrolment grew 5.2% to 4.32 million in 2024 (Eastleigh Voice, 2025). The World Bank projects that 50–55% of all jobs in Kenya will require some level of digital skills by 2030 (World Bank, 2023). Whatever your school's view of CBC, the labour market will validate the digital literacy bet.

Four gaps that still hold schools back

1. School management systems

Most schools run on Excel, exercise books, and one staff member's memory. Commercial school management systems exist, but adoption is patchy outside Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu. Familiar barriers: unreliable connectivity, low willingness to pay subscription fees, weak admin-side ICT literacy, and a fragmented vendor landscape with no KICD-blessed standard (Learnademy, 2025).

2. Timetable automation

The 2024 KICD rationalisation cut Junior School from 40 to 35 lessons per week — a 13% drop (CBC App, 2024). Most schools redrew their timetables by hand, in pencil, over a long weekend. Automated engines that respect Kenyan constraints — KICD subject codes, double-lesson rules, rationalised lesson counts — are rare.

3. Fee management and M-Pesa reconciliation

M-Pesa has solved fee collection. It has not solved fee reconciliation. The Safaricom Daraja API supports STK-push integration that lets schools trigger fee requests directly to a parent's phone, and Daraja 3.0 launched in late 2025 with promises of faster onboarding (TechCabal, 2025). Industry estimates put automated M-Pesa fee integration at over 500 Kenyan schools (Cloud School System, 2026) — real, but a small share of the country's 10,752 secondary schools. The Ministry's 2025 standardised KSh 53,000 senior-school fee (Kenyans.co.ke, 2025) only raises the stakes for accurate tracking.

4. Grading, exam analysis and SBA portfolios

CBC's eight-point scale and the 20/20/60 KJSEA weighting (The Kenya Times, 2025) require software that can store per-strand evidence over years. Most schools still hand-compile end-of-term reports, and SBA portfolios live in physical folders that can be lost or damaged. KNEC's CBA portal handles national assessment, not the school-side grade book.

The next five years of Kenyan EdTech will not be decided by who builds the flashiest learner app. It will be decided by who solves the boring four — management, timetables, fees, grades — in a way that works on a 3G phone in Bungoma.

What sector decision-makers should prioritise

Standardise on UPI and prepare for KEMIS now. Demand that any system you adopt accept the new Unique Personal Identifier as the primary learner key. Vendors that cannot integrate with KEMIS will be obsolete by 2027.
Treat fee reconciliation as data hygiene. The unmatched M-Pesa payment is a data-quality problem dressed up as a money problem. Procure a system with a daily reconciliation report and an audit trail.
Insist on the eight-point CBC scale natively. If a vendor still displays grades only as A–E or 0–100%, they are selling 8-4-4 software with fresh paint.

Where Elimikasasa fits in the wider picture

This is one of the spaces we have been working in — school management tooling that treats the CBC eight-point scale, Daraja reconciliation, KEMIS migration and rationalised CBC timetables as first-class concerns. We are one of several Kenyan teams in this lane; the more vendors do it well, the better the sector becomes. Our About and Pricing pages are the cleanest summary of how we frame the work.

The bigger point is that ICT integration in Kenyan schools is no longer a question of whether — it is which vendor, on what budget, against which government roadmap. Schools that engage that question seriously in 2026 will look, in 2030, like they were always digital.

References

CBC App (2024). A simple analysis of the numbers behind the 2024 rationalisation of the CBC. cbcapp.co.ke
Citizen Digital (2025). Govt rolls out KEMIS to replace NEMIS in push for data-driven education reform. citizen.digital
Cloud School System (2026). How M-Pesa Integration Changed School Fee Collection in Kenya. cloudschool.co.ke
Communications Authority of Kenya (2025). Education Broadband Connectivity. ca.go.ke
DataReportal (2025). Digital 2025: Kenya. datareportal.com
Eastleigh Voice (2025). Kenya expands fibre network to 13,590 km in 2025. eastleighvoice.co.ke
Eastleigh Voice (2025). Kenya's basic education institutions surge by 39pc in 2024. eastleighvoice.co.ke
Kenya News Agency (2024). Digital Literacy Programme on course. kenyanews.go.ke
Kenya Vision 2030 (2025). Integrating ICT into Teaching and Learning. vision2030.go.ke
Kenya Vision 2030 (2025). National Optic Fibre Network Backhaul Initiative (NOFBI). vision2030.go.ke
Kenyans.co.ke (2025). Ministry of Education Sets Standard Annual Fee of Ksh 53,000 for All Senior Schools. kenyans.co.ke
KNBS (2025). 2024 National School Census Pilot Report. knbs.or.ke
Learnademy (2025). Transforming School Management in Kenya. learnademy.com
MoICDE (2025). Digital Literacy Programme (DLP). ict.go.ke
TechCabal (2025). Safaricom pushes M-PESA into an API-first future with Daraja 3.0. techcabal.com
Tech-ish (2025). KEMIS to Replace NEMIS, But Critics Say It's Just Tenders in New Clothing. tech-ish.com
Techweez (2025). KEMIS: Kenya's New Education Data System Set to Replace NEMIS in 2025. techweez.com
The Kenya Times (2025). How the KJSEA 2025 grading system and placement criteria work. thekenyatimes.com
The Standard (2025). KNEC releases 2024 KPSEA results for over 1.3 million learners. standardmedia.co.ke
UNESCO (2024). ICT integration in education in Kenya: Roll-out of the Digital Literacy Programme. unesco.org
World Bank (2019). Kenya Economic Update: Accelerating Kenya's Digital Economy. worldbank.org
World Bank (2023). Demand for Digital Skills in Sub-Saharan Africa. documents1.worldbank.org

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The State of ICT in Kenyan Schools (2026): What Has Actually Changed