Vast business opportunities have been opened up for cyber cafÈs, Internet and mobile service providers. As a result, quality of service is critical to maintaining public trust.
The Kenya National Examination Council (Knec) has also embrace technology to accelerate service delivery to education stakeholders.
The examinations body now uses its website and SMS to allow parents, teachers and students speedy retrieval of exam results from its database.
Queries via SMS are charged Sh20 by Knec, leaving the Internet route for cyber cafÈs and individuals with access to computers in their work places or at home. However, those who tried to retrieve results of last year’s KCPE examination using either method were sorely disappointed.
Given the sheer number of people who flocked to the Knec website on December 29, the database collapsed because it could not handle the number of hints from impatient parents.
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This was bad news for cyber cafÈ attendants because many parents complained that they would not pay for time spent on the computers because they did not get any results.
When parents highlighted the problem of Knec’s server being out of service, the body’s Public Relations Officer, Ken Ramani, went on the defensive, arguing that parents were to blame for inundating the database with queries and contributing to its collapse.
Computer servers
But his response was hardly satisfactory. Since Knec knows the number of candidates who sat for the exam, why haven’t they upgraded their computer servers to keep up with the number of hits recorded in previous years?
Their argument is also unsustainable given that they have introduced a fee-paying fast track method through SMS where they derive monetary benefit.
Therefore, one could conclude that their failure to upgrade their servers is deliberate.
Given that every SMS costs Sh20, a delayed response forces an anxious parent to make several subsequent inquiries, which are also charged. Therefore, Knec is guilty of employing double standards by demanding integrity from others yet failing to keep its side of the bargain.
{P Njuguna, Nairobi}
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