Government
should prioritize Quality in Education Sector for the next 50years.
By
Adellah Agaba
Malcolm X, the
eloquent, inspirational and leading figure of American Civil Rights Movement
once noted that, ‘education is the great
equalizer.’ This cannot be more relevant to Uganda’s economy, which suffers
from a stratified society with expansive class differences in socio-economic
access, manifested in the huge disparities in human development indices.
In 1997, the
Government launched the Universal Primary Education (education for all); this
was part of the many recommendations of the EPRC 1989 commitments within the
Government White Paper 1992. Key of the objectives of the UPE Programme
included making education equitable in order to eliminate the
disparities and inequalities, establishing, providing and maintaining quality
education as the basis for promoting the necessary human resource development
and ensuring that education is affordable by the majority of Ugandans by
providing initially, the minimum necessary facilities and resources, and
progressively the optimal facilities, to enable every child to enter and remain
in school until they complete the primary school education cycle.
Ten years later, the Universal
Secondary Education policy came into effect in 2007, committing government to
provide free secondary education up to completion of O-level. The policy was
implemented in a phased manner beginning with senior one in 2007. These two
programmes (UPE and USE) have fundamentally impacted on the equity and quality
in both positive and negative ways.
Enrolment at primary level has been
steadily growing since the introduction of Universal Primary Education in 1997
and Universal Secondary Education in 2007. In 1996, just before the introduction
of UPE national total enrollment stood at approximately 3million and
significantly rose to 5 million in one year and later to about 7.6 million by
2007. Total enrollment in primary education is currently estimated at 8.7
Million pupils. Secondary school enrollment has been following a similar trend
hugely due to the introduction of USE in 2007. Registered enrollment in 2000
was 518,931 significantly rising to 842,683 by 2007 and currently stands at
1,570,000.
A number of efforts have been
undertaken by government to enhance learning facilities to cope up with the
increasing pupil and student intake in both primary and secondary levels. This
has included increasing the number of classrooms, recruiting more teachers and
bringing on board private secondary schools. However, there
are low completion rates, high grade repetition and significant numbers of
drop-outs. These facts seem to indicate either that the schools are not
teaching students well or that the curriculum is irrelevant to their needs. In
many cases, formal school curricula have been criticized for being unrelated to
the conditions and demands of life in rural areas.
The current education
policy focuses on expanding the functional capacity of education structures and
reducing on the inequalities of access to education between sexes, geographical
areas and social classes in Uganda. It advocates for redistribution of
resources vis-à-vis reforming the education sector.
Government
in the next 50years needs to strengthen the existing platforms for citizens’
involvement in the administration of education institutions especially at the
lower levels including school management committees, parent-teachers
association and boards of governors. Policy formulation should be consultative
enough to allow for citizen/parents’ participation at all levels and
implementation should be participatory to improve on quality in the education
sector.
If a country has poor education systems, then
there will be a skills mismatch between what’s offered and what’s required in
the labor market, or there will be no skills at all which hampers
entrepreneurship and national development.
The author works with Uganda Debt Network
