What it will take to educate Uganda’s feet
Uganda’s education system must go beyond knowledge and skills to equip graduates with the character, agency and civic responsibility to serve their communities and country, writes Barbara Kaija.
Barbara Kaija. (File)
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OPINION
Last week, in conversation with Dr Petero Wamala, I argued that alongside the head, the hands and the heart, the Ugandan education system must also educate the feet. This is the capacity of our graduates to step out and serve, to turn knowledge and character into value for someone other than themselves. We called that capacity activation and suggested that citizenship is simply the setting in which it becomes visible. This week, I turn from why the feet matter to how Uganda builds them, without losing hold of the other three.
What other nations teach us
Uganda is not starting from nothing. Singapore ties character and citizenship to defined national learning outcomes in every school, not to individual goodwill. Germany runs apprenticeships alongside formal study, so graduates already know how to show up and be accountable to a workplace and a community. Hong Kong builds integrity, responsibility and respect through real subjects and learning experiences rather than leaving them as slogans.
Uganda already has a foundation of its own in the Constitution, national education policy and the Kajubi and Mushega education commissions. These already value unity, functional skills and moral character. Our competence-based curriculum teaches students to reason and use their hands, but the challenge is to give the heart and the feet the same deliberate attention in implementation.
Six years after the lower secondary school curriculum began its rollout in 2020, a national assessment of its implementation would be timely, and it should ask not only how well students are learning to think and to do, but how well they are learning to belong.
What educating the feet requires
Start from a simple example: a trained mind that never serves anyone is a locked warehouse, full of useless value. Real learning must build not only competence but agency, the power to make conscious choices, and civic responsibility, an active care for the common good. This is the same instinct that made the traditional apprentice model work long before any nation wrote it into law. The master passed on not just a craft but an obligation to the community that craft would serve. If policymakers are serious about completing this whole picture, several shifts are needed, all of them affordable and indigenous.
1. Publish Uganda’s own portrait of a graduate. Before we can design our education system towards a goal, we need to name it, as clear as Singapore’s four words: a confident person, a self-directed learner, an active contributor, a concerned citizen. It should be built inclusively, with teachers, parents, students, business and religious leaders all at the table.
2. Write the heart and the feet into the syllabus itself. Once that portrait exists, every subject needs defined learning outcomes for character and citizenship.
3. Retool the teachers before we retool the students. Our Emerging Leaders Programme confirms what other nations already know: teachers cannot pass on values or civic habits they have not themselves learnt, so this training must be funded, not assumed. This is no small undertaking, for Uganda has approximately 226,771 primary school teachers alone.
4. Embed service into daily learning, not just as an elective. It belongs in the ordinary rhythm of the school week. That can mean service-learning classes, where students earn credit for solving a real community issue with a local partner, coursework pointed at real needs, such as a chemistry class testing soil for a community garden, or a graduation capstone that solves one concrete local problem. At the lower levels, it can start simply, with a protected Friday afternoon for community work, where learners research a problem near their school and work towards solving it. None of this holds without three basics: a standing partnership with local leaders matching real needs to school subjects, a fixed timetable block treated as core rather than extra and a brief closing reflection tying the work back to what was taught in class.
5. Turn education institutions into development hubs, not ivory towers. On the first national cleaning day, August 29, I was gratified to see the administration and staff of Don Bosco Primary School in Mulawa-Kiira bring the schoolchildren out to clean their neighbourhood.
The teacher in charge used the moment to discuss with the boys and girls the dangers of dumping kaveera. A few other schools nearby had buveera littered all over their surroundings, but their students were never engaged to clean beyond the school compound. This is exactly the kind of opportunity citizenship education should seize, and it must be modelled not only by the learners.
Teachers, too, must put on their gumboots and gloves and walk out of the school to work alongside the children and the community.
For too long, our schools have stood apart from their communities. Schools that act as development hubs connect learning to local problems, share resources and build civic trust.
One concrete route is to integrate local artisans into the school system. Fund them to take on assistants interested in a trade, whether tailoring and fashion design, carpentry and joinery, welding and metal fabrication, motor-vehicle mechanics, hairdressing and beauty therapy, agro-processing, or solar and electrical installation.
6. Build a national bridge from classroom to civic life, guided by our own values of obuntu. This means a structured national service corps, in the spirit of AmeriCorps, offering graduates a guided, paid pathway into public and community work. It also means mentorship networks linking students to leaders before graduation. Existing efforts such as Keep Uganda Clean should be anchored inside strategic plans, so they outlast a single administration.
7. Co-ordinate rather than scatter the growing citizenship and character campaigns Uganda already runs. A single national body should align them towards the same graduate, rather than each pulling in its own direction.
An appeal
This is an appeal on behalf of every child this nation is raising. We are already in a season of curriculum reform with the potential to shape nearly 11.8 million children in primary school and another two million in secondary education. It would be a quiet tragedy if we finished the work of educating the head and the hands, gestured at the heart and left the feet untrained, so that our graduates know much and can do much but never quite walk towards the neighbour, the village and the nation that raised them.
Knowledge that stays in the head is not yet knowledge; it becomes knowledge only when it travels somewhere and does something. The same is true of the heart, whose virtues are proven visible only through service. Consider how the earliest Christian missionaries in this region showed the character of their faith; not through what they professed but through the schools, clinics and hands they offered to strangers.
Feet that go start from a heart that cares, and a heart is awakened through knowledge, exposure and education.
If Uganda is to achieve the tenfold growth envisioned by President Yoweri Museveni and the National Development Plan, our curriculum developers would do well to consider a truly holistic education, one in which educating the heart transforms how graduates perceive the needs of others. Educating the mind gives the tools to understand a problem; educating the heart gives the will to act on it.
Uganda has the framework and the ambition. What it needs now is the will to educate the whole child — head, hands, heart and feet — together, deliberately and without leaving any one of them behind.
The writer is an educationist, media communication specialist and the chairperson of the board of the Emerging Leaders Programme. Kaijabarbara@gmail.com WhatsApp only: 0708746624