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.