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The Uganda Peoples’ Congress (UPC) party has challenged the Government to address widening education gaps that exist between the children of poor and rich families.

UPC suggests that this can only be done when the education ministry introduces the mechanisms to regulate fee structures in both private and government-aided universal primary and secondary education to address gaps in poor performance.

“The gap between schoolchildren of poor parents and the rich in the country is widening since UPE and USE were ushered in Uganda. When we were still in power, UPC worked for the progress of Ugandan children depending on their capacity to perform in school,” UPC spokesperson Muzeyi Faizo said on Wednesday. He was addressing journalists at UPC headquarters at Uganda House in Kampala.
To change this trend, UPC demands the Government to be focused and effective as regards delivering the desired quality education for children as we build a firm foundation to enable them to fit in a digitized and competitive world.

“The government should ensure that the Universal Primary Education (UPE) provides quality education services as opposed to just providing access to schools for our children and this requires setting a conducive learning environment for both pupils and teachers,” Muzeyi said.

"As UPC, we are fully aware and we ask the Government to follow a broader approach that promotes family and its core values, right policies that seek to make primary education free and compulsory with comprehensive remedial measures targeting all dropouts," he added.

The party has noted with great concern the challenging situation of high dropout rates right from Primary one to Primary seven.

“According to Education Abstract 2026 for the Ministry of Education and Sports, a total of 1,798,323 new entrants were registered for Primary One in 2026. At the end of the seven-year cycle of primary education, those who sat for Primary Leaving Examination were only 749,254 which is alarming,” he revealed.

By implication, 1,049,069 pupils never completed their primary education.

“If children fail to complete education at this stage, their advancement in society is fundamentally limited or with no hope at all, which gives a challenge to a country to cater for the youthful population with no skill as a result of school dropouts,” added Muzeyi.

Several studies for such school dropout point to a wider range of issues including financial challenges, early marriages, teenage pregnancies, child labour, discrimination of persons with disabilities, and domestic violence.

Primary school education provides a key foundation on which to build further education which the Government ought to effectively put more emphasis on.

If primary education is of good standards, the projections of the future are more promising, which can give hope for better man-power development which the country desperately needs to fit in the digital generation and global economy.