Deploying Large Scale School Census Hub: An Experience Report

In this paper, we address the problem of improving data collection of the education system by presenting School Census Hub (SCH). The SCH concept emerged from field studies with stakeholders in Kenya. The goal of these studies were to help unlocking three key high-level requirements for the design of SCH. i) Budget allocation, allocating budget should be based on a verifiable number of active students and teachers, ii) Spending, spending on assets should be transparent and verifiable, iii) and, Improving learning environment, unlocking the limited insight into statistical relationship between school effectiveness and demographic variables. We present the overall architecture and design of SCH based on the findings from the field studies. The first version supporting a core set of capabilities for school data collection has been implemented. To evaluate the system, we conducted a large scale pilot in 97 schools. We report on a usability study of SCH that demonstrates user awareness and support for data acquisition and reporting in education management information system in Sub-Sharan Africa.