Last week, this column argued, in its humble contribution to defining the Uganda we want, that the crisis of the great number of unemployed, unemployable and low-waged needs to occupy more space in public discourse and policy making.
To increase employability, support higher incomes, and undergird long-term development, we need to take a long, hard look at education: how and what we teach our learners.
At the rollout of universal primary education in 1997, the focus was on mass enrolment, but the quality problems were baked in. Some were obvious, in the form of inadequate infrastructure, teachers, and teaching aids. Others were less obvious, like the demand for farm labour, bottlenecks at transitional points upwards, and social dynamics like teenage pregnancy, early marriage and sexual abuse.
Thus, although the student population in Uganda tripled between 1997 and 2014, only one in three of the pioneer UPE class of 1997 made it to the end of primary school in 2003. The expansion of secondary and tertiary education has helped, but major problems of equity, quality, and outcomes remain.
Education is a great leveller and enabler, but without intentional system design, it is probably entrenching socio-economic hierarchies seen anecdotally, in the concentration of better performing schools in the south and central parts of the country. A Unicef study found that kids of the 20 percent richest families are five times more likely to continue to secondary school than those of the poorest 20 percent. Unsurprisingly, this transition is highest in Kampala and lowest in Acholi, which continues to bear the trailing effects of war, disease and destitution.
Means-tested scholarships and a higher per capita investment in public schools in poorer regions (including in teacher accommodation and salaries to attract better teachers) could be among the options considered by policymakers.
Such interventions could also aid in confronting the quality issue. Only one in two Ugandan kids is literate by the end of primary school, and less than one in two are proficient in English and mathematics in secondary school. In the absence of teachers and facilities, including laboratories, the 15 percent proficiency rate in biology among secondary school pupils is unsurprising and perhaps even miraculous.
The quality problem can feel overwhelming, which is why we should consider carefully calibrated nudges and some unconventional interventions. One is to start at the bottom, with early childhood development. Some preschools or kindergartens in Greater Kampala charge more per term than some diploma courses at Makerere University. This is because there are hardly any public preschools and kindergartens (and because parents of small kids are irrational in spending on them).
Investing in early learning should increase retention rates in the education system, improve literacy, and aid vulnerable families, including single mothers in informal employment who often can’t afford child education or care.
The second nudge, to make education more pleasant, is already being considered by the clamp down on corporal punishment. It needs to be complemented by guardrails to safeguard children from other types of harm, including the one in four Ugandan kids who are sexually abused in schools. How do we not have a sexual offender’s register in the year of our lord, 2025?
The third nudge is to redirect the focus of learning away from what learners know to what they can do. The internet has kicked down the door of the ivory tower, making learning accessible to anyone with a connection and cognitive power. Artificial intelligence will outsource even the need to find and sort information to machines/computers.
This will spill over into real-world practical applications. Robots already do much of the heavy lifting and repetitive actions in factories and will continue to do more as their dexterity and manoeuvrability improve.
Much of this disruption is still way off into the future for a middling developing country like Uganda, where urban mass transit, to give just one example, is still powered by two-wheeled maniacal riders. But the times, they are a-changin, and with them we must.
To better prepare our young people for a disrupted world of work, we must destigmatise vocational education, expand apprenticeships to give learners real-world experience, and add life skills to the curriculum, including (possibly compulsory) community service.
The millions of factory jobs that accompanied the industrial revolution in the West and the manufacturing boom in Asia will not arrive uninterrupted in our hinterlands. We must begin to imagine future-proof jobs and reimagine the way we prepare learners for them. An education system from the past can’t prepare us for the jobs of the future.