The Empty Quarter

A cartographic study of Kenya's education delivery gap across 12 counties.

The numbers

23,519 km² — Turkana's Empty Quarter alone.
136,537 km² — the 12-county Empty Quarter combined.
55.7 km — the longest walk to Form 1 in the study.
KSh 1,420 — the flat-rate capitation per primary child, the same regardless of distance.

The problem

No ward-level visibility on Form-1 reach. School registries are public. Ward polygons are public. None of them sat on the same map at the unit a child actually walks.
No distance overlay on the capitation formula. The capitation pays the same shilling whether a child is 1.0 km from a Form-1 classroom in Bungoma or 55.7 km from one in Kapedo/Napeitom, Turkana.
No cartographic imagination at the Ministry. Major development partners — FCDO, GPE, World Bank, UNICEF — sustained flat-rate capitation for a decade. Not because they were indifferent, but because nobody had drawn the delivery map.

Method

Start with the 956 secondary schools in the MoE 2021 registry, geolocated across the 12 study counties.
Rasterise the 12-county land area into a 2 km × 2 km grid — tens of thousands of cells.
For each cell, compute the great-circle haversine distance to the nearest secondary school.
Any cell more than 40 km from the nearest school is one no 13-year-old can realistically walk to school from.
Polygonise those cells via concave hull, clip to each county boundary — that is the Empty Quarter.

The benchmark — Bungoma

Land area 3,032 km². 45 wards. 1,012 primary schools. Median walk to Form 1: 1.0 km. Longest walk in the county: 9.0 km. Empty Quarter: 0 km². Every capitation shilling lands.

Read the full report

Download the FCDC Empty Quarter report (PDF)

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