A spatial database of public primary day schools in western Kenya

Understanding the location of primary schools relative to population is important to contextualize the time, or distance, that students must travel and in defining school catchment areas for planning. However, such analyses are limited due to the perennial problem for absence of geocoded school databases. We, therefore, assembled existing school databases in western Kenya, merged and cleaned them to a unique list of 2170 public day primary school in 2009 and 4682 in 2020. We focused only on PPS managed by local authorities, community, Ministry of Education, non-governmental and religious organisations. These are more accessible by the general public since the introduction of free and compulsory primary education by the Kenyan government in 2003. We also excluded special schools catering for the deaf, blind, and neurologically impaired. The database was geocoded via Google Earth, OpenStreetMap and Geonames while ensuring no schools were located within protected areas or in water bodies by carefully rechecking the coordinates derived from online gazetteers.