Uganda’s unseen education crisis: A food basket, full classrooms with hungry children

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By Dr Julius Othieno (PhD)

Uganda has achieved a logistical miracle in education: its classrooms are full. Under Universal Primary Education (UPE), millions of children stream through school gates every day. Yet, a quiet, pervasive crisis is nullifying this monumental effort. The nation faces a stark reality: children may be present, but they are not learning. The primary culprit is not a lack of books or teachers, but a more fundamental deficit: hunger.

This is not a crisis of enrolment, but of absorption. How can a child’s mind grasp mathematics or literature when their body is signalling a primal need for food? The science is unequivocal. Chronic malnutrition, which afflicts nearly a third of Ugandan children before they even enter Primary One, causes irreversible damage to cognitive development.

These children start the race already far behind. Once in school, the arithmetic of hunger takes a daily toll. A missed meal fractures concentration; chronic undernourishment drastically increases the risks of suspension and grade repetition. Studies suggest that up to 30% of Uganda’s learning deficit can be directly attributed to empty stomachs.

The policy framework, however, remains tragically disconnected from this daily struggle. The official expectation is that families will feed their children before sending them to school. But for millions living in poverty, particularly in regions plagued by food insecurity, this is a cruel fiction. The result is a perverse cycle: children are pushed out of school by hunger, which in turn entrenches the very poverty that caused it.

This crisis unfolds within a painful national paradox. Uganda is a nation blessed with extraordinary agricultural potential, yet it remains caught in the broader continental bind of underutilised abundance.

As the country imports food it could grow, its own children sit in class unfed. The nation’s fertile soils and the empty plates in its classrooms represent a profound failure of systems, not of resources.

The path forward demands a fundamental shift in perspective. School feeding must cease to be seen as a charitable add-on and become recognised as essential infrastructure for national development, as critical as a road or a power line.

The envisioned national school feeding policy is a vital first step, but its success hinges on execution. It must be more than a promise; it must be a strategically funded, locally rooted programme.

A transformative model would deliberately integrate feeding programmes with existing agricultural initiatives, like the Parish Development Model (PDM). By sourcing food from local farmers, school meals can become a powerful economic stimulus, creating predictable markets, boosting household incomes, and strengthening community ownership of education. This creates a virtuous circle: fed children learn better, and local agriculture thrives to feed them.

The cost of inaction is a generation stunted in both body and intellect, a catastrophic loss of human potential. The reward of decisive action is a smarter, healthier, and more productive future.

The lesson is clear: Uganda must first feed its children to truly teach them. The nation’s greatest test is not in filling its classrooms, but in nourishing the young minds within them. Only then can the promise of education and of Uganda itself be fully realised.

The writer is a researcher, human capital & operations specialist, osingh.julius@gmail.com