Effect of Digital Financial Management System on Accountability of Public Secondary Schools in Bungoma County, Kenya

Bungoma County has been characterized by variations in terms of school factors, infrastructure, resource allocation, and administrative capacity. Contextually, similar categories of schools are expected to record near-similar mean grades. These variations, as a result, are therefore hypothesized to be the result of other factors, especially school management. Financial management is one key aspect of school management that can contribute to this, hence its interest in the study. The objective of the study was to establish the effect of automated school fee collection on accountability of public secondary schools in Bungoma County, Kenya. The theories that guided the study were technology acceptance model theory, resource-based view theory, and agency theory. The automation of school fee collection has emerged as a transformative solution for educational institutions, revolutionizing the way schools handle financial transactions. Automated school fee collection systems offered streamlined processes for collecting, tracking, and managing school fees, replacing traditional manual methods that were time-consuming and prone to errors. The study adopted a descriptive and causal research design. The target population of the public secondary schools in Bungoma County was 482 respondents, distributed in 45 wards. A sample size of 218 respondents was selected. Stratified and simple random sampling was employed. The data was collected through interview schedules and questionnaires. The analysis was aided by Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 23. Inferential statistics, which included regression and correlation analysis, were used, and descriptive statistics, including frequency, mean, and standard deviation, were also used. The data was presented in the form of frequency tables and charts. The study found that automated school fee collection had a significant positive effect on the accountability of public secondary schools in Bungoma County, Kenya (r = 0.752, p-value = 0.000 < 0.05). The study recommends that fee collection should be automated through mobile payment approaches such as pay-bill options.