Demographic, Socio-Economic, and Professional Determinants of Depression Among Teachers in Resource-Constrained Public Schools in Kenya

Abstract

Teacher depression is a growing occupational health concern in resource-constrained public education systems, yet existing evidence rarely jointly models demographic, socio-economic, and professional risk factors. This study identifies and ranks the factors most strongly distinguishing teachers at elevated depression risk in Kenya's public schools. Survey data were collected from 1,711 public primary, Junior Secondary School (JSS), and secondary school teachers employed by Kenya's Teachers Service Commission (TSC) across multiple counties in Kenya. Depression risk was assessed using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), classified via the standard PHQ-9 ≥10 threshold. An ensemble feature-selection approach combining Random Forest, XGBoost, and CatBoost identified the twenty strongest predictors on which all three algorithms converged; a fixed top-20 threshold was applied for interpretability. 66.1% of teachers met criteria for High Risk. Absence of school-based mental-health resources was the strongest predictor, surpassing all demographic and financial variables. Mid-career tenure (11-15 years) and early-establishing-career age (25-34 years) ranked second and third; acute financial precarity outweighed static financial-literacy measures. Demographic factors accounted for the largest cumulative share of predictive importance (37.5%), followed by institutional support (30.4%), financial precarity (15.1%), professional/workload factors (10.0%), and technology access (7.0%). Cross-sectional design supports associational rather than causal interpretation; findings are confined to the counties sampled and to TSC-employed teachers, excluding contract/intern and BOM teachers. Findings support embedded school-based counselling, structural financial safeguards, and mentorship targeted at at-risk career stages, offering an empirical foundation for context-specific screening and policy interventions in under-resourced educational systems.