ESSENTIAL DIGITAL COMPETENCIES AND THEIR EFFECT ON EFFECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF KENYA'S COMPETENCY-BASED CURRICULUM AMONG EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT TEACHERS

Digital competency frameworks for teachers have proliferated internationally, yet Kenya lacks a standalone, empirically grounded competency benchmark for early childhood development teachers implementing the competency-based curriculum at Pre-Primary Two. This paper reports findings from a ten-month convergent mixed-methods study conducted across six Kenyan counties, examining the essential digital competencies of early childhood development teachers and testing their relationship with effective curriculum implementation. Data were drawn from 51 teachers who completed a structured questionnaire following school-level focus group discussions, and from 16 school heads interviewed individually. Tests of normality confirmed non-normal distributions, justifying Spearman's rho as the correlation measure. A moderate, positive, and statistically significant correlation was found between essential digital competencies and effective curriculum implementation (rho = .567, p < .001). Principal component analysis extracted two competency sub-constructs, Foundational Digital Competency and Pedagogical and Safety Competency, together explaining 69.95 percent of variance, and a single, unidimensional implementation outcome construct explaining 72.9 percent of variance. Basic device operation confidence was the weakest recorded competency, at 47.1 percent agreement, despite 88.2 percent of schools relying primarily on smartphones. Qualitative data from focus groups and interviews converged on the same conclusion as the statistical analysis: competency, not infrastructure, is the decisive determinant of effective digital integration. The paper concludes that teacher competency development should be the primary strategic lever for improving digital delivery of the curriculum at Pre-Primary Two.