Influence of Constituency Development Fund on Access to Secondary Educationin Public Secondary Schools in Kisumu County, Kenya

Access to secondary education in public schools in Kenya has not been fully achieved due to rising costs in education. In 2003, the government of Kenya adopted a devolved system of funding of education through the Constituency Development Fund in order to promote access to secondary education. In Kisumu County, the scenario is not so different from the national one. Although public secondary schools in the county receive money from Constituency Development Fund, statistics show that the Gross Enrolment Rate was at 35% lower than the national one which was 48.8% in the year 2012. The influence of Constituency Development Fund on access to secondary education was not known and this therefore warranted an investigation. The purpose of this study was to establish the influence of Constituency Development Fund on access to secondary education in public schools in Kisumu County. Descriptive survey and correlational research designs were adopted. The study population comprised of 220 public secondary school principals, 13,813 form four students, 7 Constituency Development Funds Managers and 7 Sub-County Quality Assurance and Standards Officers. Simple random sampling was used to select 140 secondary school principals and 1,400 students while saturated sampling was used to sample 6 Quality Assurance and Standards Officers and 6 Constituency Development Funds Managers. It was found that Constituency Development Fund was a significant predictor of access to secondary education in Kisumu County. This was because there was an increase in the number of new schools that were purely started using Constituency Development Funds and several classrooms were also constructed in the already existing schools within the county. The study recommended that the amount of money disbursed to secondary schools through Constituency Development Fund should be increased so as to have a higher impact on access. This study is important because it may provide useful information to education planners on how Constituency Development Fund influences access to secondary education and what needs to be done in order to effectively use it to improve enrolment in secondary schools in Kenya.