Every child in Uganda deserves a quality education

trueBy Katherine Nabuzale

Highly skilled human capital, or put otherwise, “skills per capita” of a country, is one of the surest preconditions for achieving development goals. It is needless to emphasise that high quality human capital is positively correlated with a country’s productivity.

Therefore, investing in human capital development is not only vital but crucially essential for securing the development of a country. If equitable national development is the objective of any state, then investing in quality education ought not to be selective but all-inclusive.

The inequitable development and social-economic differences that are evident in Uganda today are the result of an education system that restricts access to high quality education to a privileged few.

The persistent cycle of poverty and the various social-economic challenges faced today in our society can best be achieved with by providing a good well-rounded education to every child of Uganda. Proliferation of the public versus private education system can be argued to be one of the leading factors denying equitable access to a high quality education to every Ugandan child.

This mode of education reflects a weakness on the Government. By allowing private schools to thrive at the expense of public schools, the Government has resigned its duty of delivering a quality education to private proprietors who are driven by profit incentives before service.

The quality of education in Uganda is much dependent on one’s income and where he/she resides. Those living in towns are somehow in a better position to offer their children a fair education as compared to their counterparts in rural areas.

However, there is an exception to this. The wealthy in rural areas are sending their children to better equipped schools with well qualified teachers in urban centres. That notwithstanding, it is worth noting that the largest population of school-age going children are found in rural settings.

There are over 7.5 million pupils attending school in rural areas yet the vast majority of these schools offer a poor standard of education. This is partly due to lack of the much needed infrastructure required to have schools running smoothly.

Such basics range from shortage of well-equipped classrooms, school libraries, text books, toilets or latrines, enough trained teaching staff as well as less involvement of parents in their children’s education. The deficiency of such necessary and essential requirements has contributed to the crumbling of our education system.

Let’s ponder on a number of questions pertinent to the education crisis in Uganda. Should we just sit hand in chick and keep waiting on Government to deliver? What happened to parents and communities being actively involved in running and monitoring the education of our children? Where are the parents-teacher associations?

Where are our priorities in nation building? Are the Members of Parliament indifferent to such situations since their children go to the so called good schools? Debates in the house tend to linger more on trivial agendas than nation building, results-focussed discussions. To imagine that we have MPs carrying ipads secured by public funds when they can’t even use them is too ridiculous.

Yes we need technologically intelligent representatives in Parliament but not at the expense of pupils writing their PLE on the floor. It is absurd that there is a lot of wastage and misappropriation of resources yet we deceive ourselves of being on the right path to a developed country. We need to set our priorities right. Starting with education, government should revamp all those old schools especially in rural areas equipping them to full functioning capacity.

If we have good schools in every neighbourhood, it won’t be necessary to drive kids to those far away in the name of finding a befitting school for our

This would lead to the development of not only our community schools but of the community as a whole, and at the same time, we would reduce on the congestion in towns and save our children the stress of traffic jam and having to be woken up very early for school.

On the contrary, equitable education in developed countries is given first priority because education is highly considered as the key to development. Take for example the model of education in most of Europe.

A huge percentage of their budgets are allocated to education and research, the foundation of their growth and prosperity. It goes without saying that a good education enables broader access to knowledge and opportunities, factors which create self-awareness, understanding, as well as personal-development, in turn promoting national growth.

A dual system of education is something brilliant to borrow from the European system of education. This system promotes learning-on-the-job, apprenticeship, where by training is done at both in-house at a company and partly at local vocational colleges, supervised by experienced mentors. This is no doubt the secret to low youth unemployment in countries like Germany.
On the contrary, Uganda is grappling with high unemployment rates especially among the youth.  Therefore, there is a great need to adapt our current education system to a good mixture between education that offers intellectual knowledge and education which fosters provision of employment and furthers sustainable development.

Now is the time to start debate on real issues that affect us as a whole, and restore the sense and essence of community belongingness. It is time up for politics of self-entitlement and self-glorifying, patronage, obscene money and pure propaganda.

As a country, we can no longer accommodate mediocrity in service delivery. We have got to bring to an end this mess in the education sector. Every child is a resource of the nation and has the right to a quality education. It is time to wake up and act.

It is time to act as a community with a common purpose. Ugandans need to realize that they have the power to determine their choices. Let us do away with apathy and individualism and make bold decisions to secure a better and bright future for all our children.

For God and my country.