EduAfya Scandal: Sh2.2 Billion Lost to Ghost Students and Inflated Premiums, Audit Exposes

NAIROBI, July 17, 2025 — A staggering Sh2.2 billion meant to secure healthcare for Kenya’s secondary school students under the EduAfya scheme was paid out to ghost students and lost through inflated premiums, a damning audit by Auditor General Nancy Gathungu has revealed.

The report, tabled in Parliament on Tuesday, exposes a trail of financial mismanagement, systemic oversight failures, and questionable payments to the now-defunct National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), raising serious concerns about accountability in one of Kenya’s flagship education and health initiatives.

The EduAfya scheme, launched in May 2018, was designed to provide comprehensive medical cover for over 3.4 million public secondary school students.

Funded through the Ministry of Education’s Free Day Secondary Education program, it promised inpatient and outpatient care, accidental death benefits of Sh500,000, and last expense cover of Sh100,000 per student.

The scheme was heralded as a transformative step toward safeguarding the health of Kenya’s youth.

But Gathungu’s special audit, covering financial years 2020-21 to 2023-24, paints a grim picture of waste and potential fraud.

The audit uncovered a Sh2.293 billion discrepancy between premiums payable and actual remittances to NHIF. While the Ministry of Education was expected to pay Sh14.175 billion for the scheme, it remitted Sh16.468 billion—an excess that remains “unreconciled and unexplained,” according to the report.

This overpayment points to possible inflation of premiums or payments for non-existent beneficiaries, Gathungu notes.

Of the 9,312 secondary schools whose capitation was retained and remitted to EduAfya, only 8,846 had students accessing medical services.

This leaves 465 schools, with a total capitation of Sh273 million, showing no evidence of beneficiaries utilizing the scheme.

In some cases, the report found records of students from non-existent schools supposedly accessing services, raising red flags about the integrity of the National Education Management Information System (Nemis) used to track beneficiaries.

The financial toll is staggering.

The Ministry of Education paid Sh16.4 billion to NHIF over four years, but only Sh5.3 billion was utilized for actual healthcare services.

This means NHIF pocketed Sh11.1 billion for providing cover that was barely used.

“The value for money on the disbursed amount of Sh16,468,040,851 to NHIF for health services rendered could not be confirmed,” Gathungu stated in the report.

The audit exposed a breach of the scheme’s guidelines, which restricted benefits to secondary school students.

Shockingly, 4,100 primary schools and Junior Secondary Schools (JSS) not covered under EduAfya accessed medical services worth Sh40.163 million through 15,468 visits by ineligible learners.

This breach points to a glaring lack of oversight by both the Ministry of Education and NHIF, which entered into the contract on March 1, 2018.

Even after the EduAfya scheme officially ended on December 31, 2023, the audit found 65 facility visits recorded in Nemis EduAfya up to February 28, 2024, with medical services valued at Sh35,550.

These post-scheme activities raise questions about how and why services continued under a defunct program.

The findings point to a cascade of failures across multiple levels of oversight.

The Ministry of Education, tasked with ensuring proper use of capitation funds, failed to reconcile payments or verify beneficiaries. NHIF appears to have collected billions without delivering commensurate services.

The inclusion of non-existent schools and ineligible beneficiaries in Nemis suggests deeper issues with data integrity and system controls.

The EduAfya scheme was meant to protect Kenya’s students many from vulnerable backgrounds by ensuring access to critical healthcare.

Instead, billions of shillings meant for their well-being have vanished into a black hole of mismanagement, leaving taxpayers to bear the cost of a broken system.

The report’s findings demand urgent action. Parliament must hold the Ministries of Education and Health accountable for their roles in this scandal.

Investigations should zero in on how ghost students and schools were registered in Nemis, who authorized the excess payments, and why NHIF failed to flag the discrepancies.

The public deserves answers, and those responsible must face consequences.

For now, the EduAfya scandal stands as a stark reminder of the fragility of public trust in government programs.

As Gathungu’s audit lays bare, the promise of universal healthcare for Kenya’s students has been undermined by greed, negligence, or both.

The question remains: will this be another report shelved, or will it spark the reforms needed to protect Kenya’s future generations?