By Richard Ssewakiryanga

FOR three days, from April 16 to 18, in 27 districts across Uganda, a team of 1,700 volunteers under the Uwezo citizen-led initiative, visited 600 households. In each household the volunteers administered a simple primary two test in literacy and maths to all children between the ages of six to 16. This was done in the presence of parents and guardians at the household level.

The results will be released in June 2010, but the process has left a citizen footprint in the over 1,700 villages visited. Many of the community members reached are reflecting and thinking about the solutions of improving and contributing to the education of their children.

Uwezo was formed by members of the civil society and academia in East Africa. The initiative is in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Uwezo is a Swahili word that means ‘capability’ or in Luganda, ‘obusobozi’.

The initiative is based on the premise that in the last two decades, student enrolment across the region has grown, but with little improvements in learning outcomes, especially numeracy and literacy abilities.

In Uganda, UPE has helped to get children into school, but quality is an issue. Statistics show that enrolment figures have risen from 2.5 million in 1997 to about 7.5 million currently.

Uwezo intends to move the debate away from inputs in education, to what matters for all parents — quality education. We all celebrate the impressive first grades of every child, but everyone abhors that poor student. Just think of the cover pages of all our newspapers when the results of P.7, S.4 and S.6 are released.

Parents and journalists all work together to showcase the good stories and very few of us ever see the faces of the parents whose children have failed.

Yet many times policy debates focus on desks, classrooms, chairs, teacher’s salaries and many other things as if in themselves they will deliver quality education.

Uwezo intends to get the debate away from input to outcomes, indeed to bring back the argument many have made before — that quality education is delivered through a three-pronged approach.

Seasoned educational consultant Fagil Mandy has called it the three schools. These are the community school, education school and the household school.

The Uwezo initiative is a contribution to this approach by focusing on the household school and working with all the other component parts that will deliver quality education.

The Uwezo household-based assessment determines actual competencies in children’s reading and counting. This is done there and then in a friendly environment, using a simple test.

The process of testing and conducting the test at home is already interesting parents to think about their role in improving the quality of education their children get.

The assessment provides a basis for parents, citizens and leaders to participate and promote their children’s learning.

Uwezo, therefore, aims at igniting citizen’s response, participation and action towards improving learning outcomes for children. As one villager once said when the Uwezo-like process was started in India, where we learnt about it: “If there is a problem with your house you do not call the Government to fix it, you find grass and work on it.”

Education has suffered quite deeply from calling the Government to fix household-related issues. This is because many times, when children fail we all quickly run to the school and blame the teachers.

But Uwezo wants to have the spotlight turned away from the school and turn the floodlight to all the actors so that we all take our credit for the good grades, like all parents on the front page of newspapers when results are released, and also take responsibility for the failures that we try to bury.

When the data is analysed, for the first year we shall be able to say something about the level of literacy and numeracy of over 80,000 children in Uganda. This covers only 27 districts. Next year and for more three years will cover at least 80 of the 111 districts. The idea is not so much the process of covering more and more households, but the process of engaging parents to think about their children’s education and the actions they can take as well as the public pressure that can be put on the Government.

We all have to remember that we cannot afford to wait for P.7 to determine if a child is learning or not. We need to put in place a mechanism that is preventive.

The health sector has always had the adage ‘prevention is better than cure’. It is time the educationist also embraced such a slogan. This is because even as we launch development plans, invest in oil and talk about Uganda becoming a middle income country — what ultimately counts is the quality of education that our children get.

As citizens and parents, we cannot look on when we all have the Uwezo to influence the status quo for our children.
The writer is the executive director of the Uganda National NGO forum and the Uwezo Country Coordinator