GIS in education planning: The Kenyan School Mapping Project

Abstract

School mapping consists of the building of geospatial databases of educational, demographic and socioeconomic data for educational institutions in order to support educational planning and decision making. Such databases contain data such as the geographic location of schools, the numbers of existing schools of different levels in the public and private sectors, their capacities, physical condition and facilities, enrolment and the number of teachers and their attributes. Also often included are data on related natural features and infrastructure such as rivers, roads, economic and administrative centers, medical facilities, religious facilities, etc. This paper describes the Kenyan School Mapping Project, whose objective was to collect such data for all Kenyan learning institutions and to integrate them in a GIS database that could be queried to provide useful information for educational planners, other professional users and average citizens. Results show that at the time of the project, there were nearly 73000 learning institutions in Kenya, ranging from early childhood schools to universities; useful information products on important educational indicators such as schools distribution, enrolments, pupil-teacher ratios and gender parity indices have also been generated from GIS analysis of the data. These results have demonstrated the utility of the database for its stated purpose and therefore shown the project to be a useful model that can be emulated by other developing countries.