Methodology and sources

How the register is built

1. The base is the Ministry of Education school register for 2016 and 2010. It gives each school its name, level, ownership, region and district, exactly as the register has them.
2. A public school directory adds telephone numbers and some positions.
3. The lists published by the Commission for University Education, TVET Authority and Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service add nursing and midwifery colleges, universities, colleges of education and technical and vocational institutes, with accreditation status and dates as the regulator prints them. The level of an institution is read from the regulator’s own category and is never guessed.
4. A small number of tertiary and secondary school entries come from public encyclopaedia records and are marked as such.
5. Public facts the register does not hold, such as a founding year, a motto, a religious affiliation, a website or an openly licensed photo, are read from Wikidata, cross-checked against the school’s Wikipedia article where one exists, and shown on the school page with the source, the item and the day we read it. A website is published only after it answered when we opened it. A photo is used only under an open licence, with the author’s credit. A school whose record we could not match with confidence gets none of this rather than a guess.
6. A school can write to us from a school address to confirm or correct its record. A confirmation replaces whatever the register says, and the page then reads Confirmed by the school.

Our principles

• Official sources come first. A public record from a publisher or regulator outranks anything else.
• Names are kept as the source writes them.
• A map position we doubt is flagged. It is never guessed.
• A school filed at the centre of its town or district is moved to a position from OpenStreetMap only when the feature there carries the school’s own name, names the same level, and sits near that centre. The page credits OpenStreetMap for it, and the record keeps where it was.
• Nothing is estimated. Where we hold nothing, the page says so.
• A regulator’s own categories decide the level of an institution.
• A school can confirm its own record, and its confirmation replaces what the register says.

Fees, ratings and enrolment

Fees are shown when a school publishes them through its SchoolRegistry profile, with the date it published them. We never estimate a fee. Where a school has not published its fees, its page says so and lets parents ask the school to publish them.

There are no ratings and no enrolment figures for any school, because no public register in Kenya holds them and nothing here is estimated. If a school tells you something different, the school is right.

We publish no school rankings for Kenya. KNEC publishes no school league table, and we hold no school-level KCSE results, so nothing is ranked on exam scores. A ranking will appear only once it has another published basis, such as KUCCPS placement, Commission for University Education accreditation or TVET Authority registration, and its method is shown here.

Licences and credits

The school directory data is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Data licence: CC BY 4.0, credit SchoolRegistry. The exception is the 3,098 records that come only from OpenStreetMap and appear on no official list. Those records are © OpenStreetMap contributors and are published under the Open Database Licence 1.0, which is share-alike: anyone who publishes a database built from them must offer it under the same licence and credit OpenStreetMap. The other 74,619 records stay under CC BY 4.0. Each record’s page names its source.

Public facts on school pages come from Wikidata, whose data is released under CC0, with the item linked on each page. School photos are from Wikimedia Commons, each shown with its own licence and the author’s credit under the photo.

Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence. Place names are from GeoNames, under CC BY 4.0. Indicator series from World Bank Open Data are used under CC BY 4.0. Photographs carry their own credit and licence beside the picture.

Research partner

SchoolRegistry Kenya is part of the same research group as PollsAfrica. If you want to see how its polls and surveys are designed, read PollsAfrica's published research methods. The two sites keep separate data and editorial teams, and neither ranks the other's records.

Every source in full

Each row names the publisher, the dataset or document and the year it reports.

A source missing from this page, or a record that is wrong, can be reported to data@schoolregistrykenya.com. What each record status on a school page means is explained on How we handle data.