Where the gaps are

10 of Kenya's 47 counties list no course a school-leaver with an E can enter. 10 of those 10 list no artisan course at all — so this is not a grade problem that better filtering would solve. It is one missing tier.

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Finding 1 — a county can be open and still be nearly empty

3 counties have their entire listed provision from a single institution, and in every one of them that institution is a KMTC campus: Isiolo, Lamu and Tana River.

This is a different failure from the closed counties below, and until this edition nothing here measured it. Every other figure on this page asks whether the lowest door in a county is open. None of them asks how many doors there are. A learner in one of these counties is not shown a short list — they are shown one prospectus, and KMTC runs one national programme set across forty-odd campuses, so the two records they see are the same two records their neighbours in the next county see.

As everywhere on this page, a small number describes Njia's catalogue and not the county. These counties run technical and vocational provision that this catalogue has not yet listed; the worklist is Njia's.

Finding 2 — the blindness is a missing tier, not a high bar

Level 4 (artisan) is the only qualification a learner with an E can enter. KUCCPS places at E for artisan; craft certificate generally opens at D and diploma at C-. So a county with no artisan provision listed is a county closed to the reader with the fewest alternatives, however many diplomas it runs.

11 counties list no artisan course: Elgeyo-Marakwet, Isiolo, Kitui, Laikipia, Lamu, Machakos, Makueni, Narok, Tana River, Tharaka-Nithi, Wajir.

10 of those 11 are among the 10 counties showing zero courses reachable at E — so the missing tier and the closed county are very nearly the same list. The fix in those 10 is an institution, not a filter. Eight counties were closed in a single earlier pass by searching for the county's technical college and finding one that had never been listed — every one of them already had a KMTC campus and a university in the catalogue, and still read as blind, because the tier that was missing was the only one that mattered to this learner.

The two that are a different problem

do list artisan courses, at a published minimum of D-, which an E does not clear. That is a genuine published entry requirement rather than a gap, so it is named here separately rather than folded into the 10: the remedy is to confirm with the institution whether an E is in practice admitted, not to go looking for a college that is already listed.

Finding 3 — the fee picture is clear per pathway, not per course

Half the catalogue carries no tuition figure, which is true and unhelpful: it says nothing about whether a given pathway is priced. Split by who owns the institution and what level it teaches, the hole is not uniform — it is a sharp and explainable pattern.

Public artisan is the best-priced pathway in the catalogue — and it is the tier a learner with the fewest options enters. Nearly all of it derives from one national figure, the consolidated public-TVET fee of Ksh 67,189 a year, which is why the median sits exactly there.

Public degrees are 9% priced, and that is correct rather than missing. Kenya retired the Differentiated Unit Cost in May 2023 for the Student-Centred Funding Model, under which what a student pays is set by an assessed means band. There is no per-programme price to publish, so a fuller column here would mean invented numbers.

Private provision is where the genuine gap sits — every private degree and every private artisan course in the catalogue carries no figure. Those institutions do publish schedules, as PDFs on their own sites, which is the one place this project's research cannot reach. That is a reachability limit, not a decision, and it is the honest place to point anyone asking what to fix next.

Finding 4 — almost nobody publishes a course fee

14 of 1367 course fees in this catalogue were published by the institution for that specific course. Only 4 of 47 counties contain a single one. Every other figure Njia shows is either derived from a published rate — the government's consolidated public-TVET fee, a national schedule — or absent entirely, and every card says which.

That is a finding about Kenyan fee publication, not about Njia's research. A family comparing two colleges is comparing two numbers that mostly do not exist in public, which is why the comparison is usually made by phoning around and why it so often gets made badly. The fee_published_by_institution column in the CSV is the count per county; the full catalogue export carries it per course.

The table

All 47 counties. "Reachable at" counts courses whose published minimum that grade clears. Counties with nothing reachable at E are named in bold, and a zero is highlighted only in the three columns where it means a learner has nowhere to go — artisan, at E, at D. A zero under Degree is ordinary: most counties have no university and are not meant to.

What this does and does not measure

• It measures Njia's catalogue. 1367 courses at 216 institutions. It is not the TVETA register and does not claim to be a census of Kenyan provision.
• "Reachable at E" counts published minimums. An institution may admit below its published grade; a learner should ring and ask. The column records what is printed, because that is what a learner can check before they travel.
• There is no employment rate and no salary column, here or anywhere in Njia, because Kenya does not publish either per course. Any analysis offering you those figures per course is telling you something it cannot know.
• Fees change and grades change. Confirm with the institution before anyone acts on a figure.

Using it

Please attribute to Njia and link back. If you are citing a zero, cite it as "not listed in Njia's catalogue" rather than "not available in the county" — the difference is the whole point of the box at the top.