Education Ministry to develop software to locate and track textbooks

The ministry of education is set to develop a software that will be used to track and report the exact location of the books that it distributes to schools, under the new text-books’ distribution policy. Appearing before the Parliamentary Education Committee, the Education PS, Dr. Belio Kipsang told the Hon. Julius Melly led committee that they are developing the software to enable easy monitoring of the books. “At any one time we will know where the books are,” said Dr. Kipsang

Dr. kipsang said the ministry is working with the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development, KICD, to develop a serialization software to track the location of the books that is similar to those used on drugs and other pharmaceutical commodities. This tracking system works by imprinting a unique code onto each commodity after packaging. This latest move comes amid claims of delays by publishers to timely distribute the textbooks to various parts of the country citing poor weather and terrain. Under the new textbook policy duped ‘one text book policy’, Moran, Longhorn, Kenya Literature Bureau, oxford press and East african Educational Publishers were awarded the Kshs. 7.6 Billion tender to cut off cartels and corruption in the old dispensation where schools were mandated with the responsibility of procuring of the textbooks.

A report released by Ethics and Anti- Corruption Commission, EACC, in 2016 exposed heightened corruption and fraud where schools’ heads could fail to purchase the textbooks and diverted the cash meant for the books to other uses. The shocking revelations showed that school heads and procurement committees could forge signatures, over price the text books or even single source the books, flouting the procurement rules.

The government has already disbursed textbooks for core subjects for all form ones who joined high school, this year.

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