Govt should hire procurement officers in public schools

By Charles Barasa

The New Vision of March 25, 2025, carried a leading headline “Govt takes over fees collection in public schools”. 

In brief, the government intends to centralize the collection of school fees in public schools through the Uganda Revenue Authority. The rationale behind this policy is to improve financial oversight and transparency and prevent mismanagement of funds by school administrations. 

The debate highlights ongoing challenges in Uganda's education system, including underfunding and inconsistencies in policy enforcement. 

The final decision on the proposed URA fee collection system is still pending as stakeholders continue to weigh its benefits and drawbacks.

But this has been the case in all public tertiary institutions for a number of years now, and apart from the slight delay in releases, which is a common thing across public entities, this has worked well so far. 

The same can apply to public schools.

Just like any other government intervention before, this proposal was bound to meet some criticism from stakeholders like parents, teachers, and education experts. 

Critics argue that delays in releasing funds from URA to schools could disrupt operations, as some schools rely on timely fee payments to cover essential expenses like teacher salaries, meals, and learning materials. 

But in a broader perspective, this is a good step by the government in many aspects; There are government schools which have been increasing fees annually, and some allegedly ask for a non-refundable deposit of up to sh3,000,000 before issuing an admission letter. 

These funds are largely unaccounted for in the true sense of the Public Finance Management Act. With this new development, such schools will definitely lose the appetite to charge exorbitant fees.

But this is beside my point. What the government should do in addition to this policy is go ahead and recruit procurement officers for all these public schools and have a contracts committee.

Since the enactment of the Public Procurement & Disposal Act in 2003, Hundreds of thousands of procurement professionals have since trained.

The mainstream public service and local governments do not employ even 10% of these trained procurement professionals, yet the private sector has not yet embraced the importance of having a fully-fledged Procuring and Disposing Unit as part of their organograms.

While these well-trained procurement professionals are roaming the streets jobless, schools are mismanaging procurement processes with reckless abandon, leading to humongous financial losses with no one to hold accountable.

I have been the Chairman Board of Governors for one of the public schools in this country for the last 6 years. I have experienced first-hand how difficult it is for the BOG to have visibility over the PTA Collections bank account.

The BOG, in most cases, is only given access to the Capitation account, obviously because this is one in-flow transaction account per quarter.

The collections on the PTA account are fluid and, in many cases, cash is collected at school but not deposited into the account. There is also the issue of spending at source, which is a bad practice in any Financial management system.

 I have also seen how procurement regulations do not work in these public schools, and the only regulations that work are the whims of the school administrators. 

While recruiting procurement officers in public schools is not a silver bullet to financial mismanagement, there is a high likelihood that the government will achieve the value-for-money objective as these trained professionals are legally aware of the implications of sticking to regulations.

The writer is a procurement practitioner.