The Commissioner for Basic Education in the Ministry of Education and Sports, Dr Cleophas Mugenyi, has revealed that early childhood development has been consistently receiving less than two percent of the ministry’s total allocation, far below Uganda’s early childhood care and education policy aspiration of 10 percent.
While sharing findings about Uganda’s early childhood development policy in relation to the Kulea Watoto program at the National inception meeting of the program’s second phase at Fairway Hotel in Kampala on June 11, 2026, Dr Mugenyi said poor funding of ECD partly explains why children under five continue to experience stunted growth.
‘The 2024 statistics show that over one million, 48 percent of refugee children in Uganda under five years are experiencing stunting growth, while 81 percent of children aged three to four are developmentally off-track because 80 percent of their parents cannot afford early childhood development fees. This highlights critical financial and income barriers amongst parents and guardians,’ Dr Mugenyi said.
According to Uganda’s National Development Plan IV, which runs from 2025 to 2030, early childhood development is a core pillar under human capital development that targets universal ECD access by 2030.
Mondo Kyateka, the Assistant Commissioner for Youth and Children Affairs in the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, reminded parents to stop giving birth to many children and instead have a manageable number they can qualitatively raise.
‘Why are you, parents, producing like you have a contractual obligation to fill the clan? You find a woman producing more than 10 children because the husband was his parent’s only child. It is not sustainable in the long term. Produce children you can afford to take care of instead of giving birth for the streets,’ Mr Kyateka advised.
On his part, Timothy Opobo, the Executive Director of AfriChild, said the second phase of the Kulea Watoto two-generation approach that targets children and their caregivers focuses on promoting children’s early learning, health and development, and building parental or caregiver capacity and resilience, as well as protective factors within families.
‘The two-generation approach is better than the one-approach because children’s outcomes are intertwined within their home environment. The quality of a child’s proximal is crucial for their development especially during the early years,’ Opobo said.
Implemented by different partner organisations, phase two of the Kulea Watoto program will run from April 2026 to March 2029 and targets impacting 400 households in Kampala and 600 households in Bidi Bidi refugee settlement in Yumbe district in the West Nile sub-region.