EduPortal Kenya

What needed to change and why it mattered.

A network of 38 secondary schools across Nairobi County was managing student admissions, fee payments, examination results, and parent communication through spreadsheets, paper forms, and WhatsApp groups.

Critical student information was siloed across individual schools with no central oversight. Staff spent hours each week on manual data entry. Fee collection was entirely cash-based with no digital receipting. Parents had no reliable channel for tracking academic progress outside of physical report cards issued once a term. The county education office had no real-time visibility into enrolment figures, fee compliance, or academic performance across the network. A missed fee payment might not be noticed for weeks. A student transferring between schools had to carry physical documents that were often lost or incomplete.

What we built and how we approached it.

We built a unified school management platform covering student admissions, fee collection with M-Pesa integration, result publication, and a parent-facing mobile portal. The system runs on a multi-tenant architecture allowing all 38 schools to operate independently while the county education office maintains oversight through a central dashboard.

The platform was designed mobile-first, knowing that most parents would access it on entry-level Android devices on 3G or 4G connections. The admin interface was kept deliberately simple after user testing revealed that many school staff had limited prior experience with web applications. M-Pesa fee collection was integrated via the Daraja API with automatic receipt generation and a reconciliation dashboard for school bursars. The parent portal was built as a Progressive Web App so it could be added to a home screen without requiring an app store download. We ran a three-week parallel operation period where both the old and new systems ran simultaneously before full cutover, which prevented any disruption to an active school term.