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 CS, however, acknowledged Treasury commitment to avail an additional Sh3.1 billion in the first supplementary budget.
“The deficit has therefore reduced to Sh3.723 billion. We have written to the National Treasury to seek an additional budget to address the foregoing deficit. We have also sought a disbursement to enable the council to adequately fund this year’s examination and assessment processes, clear outstanding pending bills,” Ogamba said.
He was accompanied by Knec chief executive officer David Njengere during the morning session with the committee chaired by Tinderet MP Julius Melly.
During the meeting, the CS was also required to explain the status of capitation, given that schools require funds to purchase other critical items like for laboratories and other apparatus.
This is after it emerged that 29 schools were missing completely from this year’s capitation, a situation the ministry linked to pending registration status.
“Some of these schools are in the process of being registered and thus were not in our data for capitation,” Ogamba told the MPs.
Melly, however, demanded that the ministry furnish the team with detailed list of the 29 schools and reason why they have been locked out.
“I am directing that you provide us with the list of the 29 schools by end of tomorrow [Thursday], we will then deliberate and give further directions,” the Tinderet lawmaker 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.
Ogamba said the schools that failed to provide data include 570 primary schools and 420 in the secondary category.
The Ministry of Education has insisted on verifying student data before releasing capitation funds to combat corruption and the loss of billions of shillings to “ghost schools and students”. The verification process caused significant delays in 2025, but the ministry has since released funds for schools that have complied with the audit.