The things schools ask us first

Yes to both.

An academic framework in Msomi is a configurable object rather than an assumption in the code. CBC, KCSE and Cambridge each carry their own levels, subjects and grading systems.

That means a school running a transitional cohort operates two frameworks inside one school, with two clean ladders of levels. Because grading systems attach to a specific framework and level, a CBC performance level is never accidentally averaged with a KCSE mean grade.

Yes. Grading is configuration, not a fixed assumption.

You define each grading system with its own grade ranges — lower bound, upper bound, grade, points and the remark that should appear — along with the pass mark, and optionally bands that group ranges into broader categories.

Different systems apply to different levels, so the lower school and the candidate classes can be graded on entirely different scales. Revising a boundary re-reports results without touching any learner’s raw marks.

Msomi is a per-school subscription across five tiers — Trial, Basic, Standard, Premium and Enterprise.

You can be billed monthly, termly or annually. Termly is the most common choice, because a three-term year is the unit Kenyan schools actually budget in.

What you pay depends on your enrolment and which modules you need, so we quote per school rather than publishing one figure that would be wrong for most people. A quote takes a short conversation.

Yes — a full term, not a fortnight.

The Trial tier gives you a complete school on Msomi with every module unlocked, so you can load your real learners, run a real register and reach a decision on evidence rather than on a demonstration.

Setup is guided and includes bulk import of your existing lists. If you continue, your data carries straight over; there is no re-entry and no separate migration step.

Yes. M-Pesa is how most Kenyan school fees are actually paid, so it is handled directly.

Payments are captured with their transaction code and matched to the learner’s fee account. That turns the monthly reconciliation from a manual search through a statement into a review of the handful that did not match automatically.

Bank transfers, cheques, cards and cash are recorded the same way, each carrying its own reference, so the fee ledger shows not just that a payment arrived but how.

The school owns its data. Msomi holds it on your behalf; it is not ours to trade, withhold or sell.

Every list in the system exports to Excel at any time and without asking us: learners, staff, marks, attendance registers, fee statements, the full academic structure. Exports are formatted for the two things schools actually do with them — board reporting and ministry returns.

If you ever decide to leave, you leave with your records in a format you can use.

Msomi is built around the principles of the Data Protection Act 2019. Schools are among the most heavily obligated data controllers in the country — almost everything they hold concerns minors.

In practice: personal data is collected for defined purposes; access follows responsibility, so a teacher sees the learners they teach rather than the whole school; and the most sensitive records, such as medical information, are restricted further to designated staff.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and hosted in an African region. We sign a data processing agreement with every school setting out what we do as processor and what remains your responsibility as controller.

No — and the reason is worth being precise about.

Every record in Msomi belongs to a school. That boundary is enforced at the data layer: queries are scoped to the signed-in school before they run, rather than filtered in the page that displays them, which is the approach that fails quietly.

There is no report, export or search in the system that can return another school’s records.

Msomi’s own platform staff operate under a separate privilege scope entirely, and cannot reach school records through the ordinary school-facing routes.

Yes — and it is one of the things Msomi is most deliberate about.

A parent-engagement strategy that assumes smartphones excludes exactly the families that most need contact from the school. So SMS is a first-class channel in Msomi rather than something bolted on afterwards.

Every notification the app delivers has an SMS equivalent, sent automatically to guardians who are not using the app: absence alerts, published results, fee reminders, bus notifications and one-time codes for account setup. All of it reaches a feature phone.

Yes. Connectivity inside a classroom block cannot be assumed, and a system that requires it is a system teachers abandon within a term.

The teacher app captures registers and marks offline and syncs automatically when the connection returns. A teacher never waits for a signal to finish taking a register.

The wider system is built to be light on bandwidth, which matters when the whole school shares one connection.

Setup is guided for every school: we help you configure your academic structure and import your existing learner and staff records.

Training is delivered by role rather than as one long session for everybody. Administrators, teachers and the bursar each get a short session covering what they will actually do — the format schools tell us actually sticks.

Ongoing support depends on your plan: email on Basic, email and phone on Standard, priority support on Premium, and a named account manager with a service level agreement on Enterprise.