New education and sports sector strategic plan launched

First Lady and Education Minister Janet Museveni (C) addresses the plenary session of the education and sports sector review workshop flanked by State Minister for Higher Education John Muyingo (R) and State Minister for Primary Education Rosemary Seninde. Photo by Maria Wamala

A new three year strategic plan for the education and sports sector has been launched with a major focus on achievement of equitable access to education and training for all, effective service delivery and quality enhancement in the sector.

Among the priority intervention areas include feeding school children, the operationalization of Soroti University bringing the total number of public universities to nine, and establishment of a constituent college of Gulu University in Karamoja.

The Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) is also looking at constructing a primary government school in each parish and secondary school in every Sub County across the country, to lessen the distance children have to walk to access school.

Other priority areas include increasing the number of scholarships for disadvantaged areas, strengthening the current inspection system, improving teacher-instructor, tutor competencies, talent identification and nurturing, institutionalization of internship and apprenticeship, mainstreaming physical education and sports and provision of free scholastic materials to students.

While presenting the priority intervention areas during day two of the Education and Sports review workshop, Aggrey Kibenge, the undersecretary of the education ministry, said that they will develop and implement a strategy to address school feeding and nutrition for school going children.

He said the strategy will focus on sensitizing of parents about their role in feeding children and providing school uniforms.

While launching the strategy, the First lady and Minister of Education and Sports, Janet Museveni noted that the three year strategy is in tandem with the country's National Development Plan II, the NRM manifesto and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.

"It will guide the sector as it navigates through its ambitious goals of providing quality education with an insufficient resource envelope," she said.

The two day sector review workshop was held at the office of the Prime Minister. It started on Tuesday and ended Wednesday.

On its opening day, the ministry released an annual performance report showing that it had scored highly in the sectors infrastructural development.

However, a report from the Ministry of Finance's budget monitoring and accountability unit released on the same day, revealed that recurrent programs performed better than the development projects in the sector.

The report stated that the developments were constrained by low releases and procurement delays which led to low absorption across the sector.