Impact of income generating activities on financing secondary schools education in Migori County, Kenya

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of income generating activities on education in secondary schools in Migori County, whereby the specific objectives were: to find out whether the Principals and other stakeholders were positive towards IGAs, to identify the proportion of the school budget taken over by the IGAs; to determine the estimated amount of money that IGAs were able to raise towards financing secondary education and to find out the type of IGAs at the disposal of the secondary schools. The study targeted all 114 secondary schools in Migori County whereby 20% were randomly sampled producing 22 secondary schools. A questionnaire was administered to the Principals of the selected secondary schools, Interview schedules administered to the BOG and PTA chairpersons and observation schedule was used during tile visit to the sampled schools to corroborate the information from the other instruments. A pilot study on five public secondary schools randomly sampled from the neighbouring Homabay County was used to test the construct and content validity and reliability of the instruments. The data was analyzed using SPSS and given in frequencies and percentages then the results were summarized and presented in graphs and tables. The findings indicated that all the 's-takeholders were positive of the idea of introducing Income Generating Activities in secondary schools. It was also revealed that the money real ized from these income generating activities were to be used in availing physical facilities, maintaining them, pay recurrent expenditures c.g. teachers employed by the BOG and others including paying fees to the bright but needy students. These IGAs identified included sugarcane cultivation, maize cultivation, rearing dairy cows, hiring out school facilities for different" purposes. The findings also revealed that these IGAs could give quite substantial amount of money that could contribute significantly towards development of the schools. It CQJ1(;Judes that there was a positive impact of IGA on financing secondary schools education in Migori County. The study recommends that the Ministry of Education encourage secondary schools in Kenya to practice income generating activities that would reduce economic constraints in public secondary schools. Schools should be encouraged to accept fees payment in kind. The study proposes further investigation in to potential income generating activities in all public learning institution and another study to analyze strategies for reducing costs in learning institutions.