Assessing Secondary School Teachers’ Digital Competence for Competency-Based Education Implementation in Bungoma County, Kenya: A TPACK-Based Study

Kenya's shift to Competency-Based Education (CBE) assumes teachers can translate ICT tool access into learner competency development. This study assessed the level of teacher digital expertise in CBE implementation to establish whether this assumption is empirically warranted. A concurrent mixed-methods case study was conducted in public secondary schools in Bungoma County, Kenya. An 11-item Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) scale, extended with a Digital Self-Efficacy (DSE) dimension, was administered to 190 teachers (97.9% response rate) drawn from 43 stratified-sampled schools, and triangulated with 40 structured classroom observations and 35 key informant interviews. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and thematic analysis. Teachers reported moderate proficiency across all four domains (M = 2.83–3.01, five-point scale), with Digital Self-Efficacy the weakest (M = 2.68–2.88) and Content Knowledge the strongest. Over half of teachers (55.8%) had received no formal ICT training or only short, disconnected courses. PCA extracted a single dominant component explaining 86.80% of variance (KMO = .962; Bartlett's χ²(55) = 3362.24, p < .001; loadings .904–.949), indicating that the four TPACK domains function as one interdependent construct rather than separable skills. Teachers themselves identified their own digital capacity (60.3%), not infrastructure, as the dominant barrier to effective ICT use, and prioritised sustained professional development (62.5%) over equipment provision. Professional development in CBE contexts should be redesigned as an integrated, school-embedded programme that builds technical, pedagogical, content, and confidence-related competencies simultaneously, with deliberate attention to Digital Self-Efficacy, rather than as isolated technical-skills workshops. This study extends TPACK with an empirically validated Digital Self-Efficacy dimension and provides one of the few PCA-based demonstrations that teacher digital expertise operates as a unified rather than additive construct in a Sub-Saharan African CBE setting, offering an evidence base rarely available for policy design in the region.