Datafying Children
Kenya’s National Education Management Information System
On the death of Kenya’s second and longest ruling president, Daniel Moi, in 2020, the phrase “watoto wa Nyayo” trended on social media. Swahili for Nyayo’s children — a reference to those who went to school during the Moi era — the virtual moment brought together people who grew up in the 1980s and 90s. They reminisced about Moi’s policies on children, the most memorable being a school milk feeding program. While the value of the program is controversial (as with all of Moi’s legacy), such programs, targeting millions of children, have been common in each of Kenya’s administrations.
At Moi’s departure, children’s services came to be conceptualized as rights, and a comprehensive Children’s Act was passed in 2001. In 2003, the country introduced compulsory free primary education. Since then, all children, girls included, must attend primary school, at the risk of criminal sanctions for their parents.
Free primary education (FPE) has arguably been Kenya’s most ambitious children’s program. The previous administration instituted a per capita support program where each primary school would receive funds according to the number of enrolled pupils. FPE received global awards and development funds from various actors, the most prominent being the Global Partnership for Education, a multistakeholder initiative of donors, receiving countries, and civil society organizations in education.
Enter the Digital
Under Kenya’s current administration, there has been increased interest in management of FPE and targeted provision of services to identifiable beneficiaries. A digital ID program, which issues a unique personal identifier to every learner, has been instituted: in 2018, the Ministry of Education issued a directive requiring all learners in schools to be registered into the National Education Management Information System (NEMIS). Compulsory NEMIS registration is tied to access to services such as registering for national examinations, applying to join a secondary or tertiary institution, and transferring from one institution to another. To be registered, children need a copy of their birth certificate, together with a parent’s national identity card and telephone number.
Issues of Exclusion
This requirement has been a subject of contestation. Parents who had not registered their children’s births — and they were many — flocked to civil registration centers in search of birth certificates. With increased demand, there were delays in production of the document, leading to calls for more registration centers as well as petitions for transitional periods during which children could access education services while their parents pursued their documents. Such petitions, when granted, resolved the problem for those with the requisite supporting documents (for example, the national ID) to obtain a birth registration.
However, there are those who have historically faced political, logistical, cultural, and social barriers in accessing citizenship documentation. For example, people from underserved border areas lacking citizenship documentation services typically have to wait for periodic drives to apply for documents. Also, before the FPE program, many girls in rural areas would be married early and settle into domestic life before obtaining the national ID card. Their children’s births, therefore, were typically not registered unless there were special programs bringing documentation services to them or a specific need arose. There are also the cases of non-European immigrants who, like those in border communities, are put through arduous processes for registration.
Issues of Inclusion
While issues of exclusion are a central focus in digital ID advocacy, new questions are also emerging around the uses to which digital ID data may be put and how to apply existing principles on children in the digital realm. Required NEMIS registration means that many Kenyan children will receive identity documents for the first time.
Digital identity documents increase the legibility of children to government, and digital ID data use is closely connected to a shift in the provision of children’s services.
Digital ID programs across Africa are centralizing identity data and the uses associated with that data. Prior to digital ID, children’s programs — be they immunization, school feeding, or education programs — were delivered as social welfare services. What guided children’s services were African philosophies on children as well as principles such as the best interests of the child or the evolving capacities of children. Only a small number of specific children were in contact with the legal system and therefore had contact with national security organs.
With centralized digital ID systems, children collectively come into contact with national security services, in the first place because digital ID services — enrollment, authentication, issuance of documents, etc. — are provided by an agency hosted by national security organs. Even if services were provided by another agency, the existence of a database on children would be of interest to law enforcement functions. This has already been witnessed in Kenya, where the Directorate of Criminal Investigations has issued warnings that delinquent students would be denied good conduct certificates. These are “no criminal record” certificates that are often required when applying for jobs, visas, and other opportunities.
In tandem with law enforcement data use, another concern is law enforcement philosophies permeating children’s services. Such philosophies include policing students and keeping records of delinquency (even when it does not equate to crime). Databases can be used to profile and “predict” criminal behavior and to enforce rules. While there is no public policy document on Kenya’s NEMIS, pronouncements by government officials indicate that keeping behavioral records of students is among the capabilities of the system. The extent to which information such as the temperament of a student is recorded in NEMIS is not clear, but the power derived from having a centralized register of students is palpable.
For example, following a spate of fires at boarding schools last year, the Ministry of Education Cabinet Secretary directed that students expelled due to involvement in the fires not be allowed to transfer to other schools. This implied that the system has the capability of flagging such students. This should be a cause for concern: an administrative directive (whether appropriate or not) with an impact on the rights of children, a vulnerable group, is being enacted through NEMIS.
On what issues can administrative directives regarding data be given? To whom should the public take their grievances on directives that are overreaching? Who checks the administrators?
Colonial Continuities
Pundits link accumulation and consequent imbalances of power in the post-independence state to colonial legacies. Africans who were selected as colonial functionaries used their power to control their compatriots and acquire wealth. At independence, they maintained systems which had been a bone of contention with the colonial government, as the systems were useful in their quest for power.
One such system was registration of persons, the hallmark of violent colonial policing. It is this system currently being transformed into digital ID — and also being expanded to datafy children’s relationship with the state.
While the benefits of legal identity for children are not in doubt, Kenya’s previous experiences with identity documentation call for negotiated digitalization with respect to children, to ensure that their childhoods are not harmed in the name of digital identity.
Grace Mutung’u is a technology policy researcher based in Kenya. She is currently coordinating Open Society Foundations’ Digital ID Working Group.
Datafying Children is the sixth post in Towards a Mindful Digital Welfare State, a series investigating data-driven state services, commissioned by Researcher Ranjit Singh and Research Analyst Emnet Tafesse at the AI on the Ground Initiative at Data & Society, with editorial support from Seth Young.
To date, the series also includes:
- Towards a Mindful Digital Welfare State by Ranjit Singh
- Between Belonging and Individuating: Data, Identification, Diaspora by Emnet Tafesse
- Good Welfare, Bad Platforms? by Silvia Masiero
- Critical Digital Education for All! by Soledad Magnone
- Code as Policy by Rajesh Veeraraghavan
- Identifying Beneficiaries in Ghana’s Donor-Oriented Welfare State by Alena Thiel
