This face-to-face seating arrangement, now standard in Primary One and Primary Two classes across parts of the district, is a small but telling example of a broader shift taking place in Nwoya’s government schools.
Alongside renewed efforts to pull parents back into their children’s education, it is beginning to move the needle on learning outcomes in a district that, 16 years after its creation, is still building the basic infrastructure of universal education from the ground up.
A young district, an old struggle
Nwoya was carved out of Amuru District in 2010. In the time since, its leadership has overseen the rollout of full desk coverage across 44 government-aided primary schools, which together enroll roughly 26,000 learners, according to data from the office of the District Education Officer.
Olwiyo Primary School, sitting just off the Karuma-Pakwach Highway, is one of them. Its 14 teachers – three of them women – serve 734 learners, 358 girls and 376 boys, against a staff ceiling of 15.
Head teacher Boniface Odong Ochan is honest about both the promise and the limits of what the school can do. “When we work and we commit ourselves as staff and the community, we can have close to around 1,000 learners in the next two years,” he says.
Getting there, he admits, means confronting parents who still see little value in sending children to school at all. “There are people who really don’t take interest in sending even the children to school. We have some organisations giving us support to mobilise and sensitise the community on the importance of education.”
Odong wants political leaders drawn more directly into that effort. “We want to engage politicians, to let them understand that education is key,” he says.
Where are the boys?
A visit to Olwiyo Primary School on August 7, 2026 turned up an attendance pattern that has become a quiet concern among the school’s staff: in several classes, boys were noticeably outnumbered by girls. Primary Five had 58 girls against 25 boys. Primary One recorded 65 girls to 64 boys. Primary Three had 45 girls and 43 boys. Only in Primary Four did boys hold a numerical edge, 57 to 53.
Odong links the imbalance to years of programming that, in his view, has centred girls’ education without an equivalent push for boys. “The focus has been on girl child education. And because they feel neglected, the boy children tend not to come to school,” he says.
“As teachers, we see this true reflection in their attendance and their commitment in classes. Before you came here, we were here for an assembly and close to 90% of learners who made presentations were girls.”
His prescription is balance, not a swing of the bob in the other direction. “Equal support should be given to all the children, irrespective of their sexes,” the head teacher of Olwiyo Primary School argues.
“If boys are not there to work with the girls, like to share experiences, definitely you will never see good results. They must be brought together at the same level and move as a team. When we leave our children behind, the dreams that we have made may not be able to be achieved.”
The numbers behind the optimism
District Education Officer Philip Oryema is careful not to overstate what has been achieved – 44 schools, he says plainly, are not enough to give the district’s population adequate access to primary education. But on the metric that matters most to families and policymakers alike, results are moving in the right direction.
“In 2025, we saw the pass rate of children hitting 70 percent. Three years ago, the pass rate was at 60 percent,” Oryema says of Primary Leaving Examination performance.
The DEO breaks the arithmetic down further: roughly 60 percent of candidates land in Divisions One through Division Three, with the remaining 40 percent falling into Division Four, Division U, or Division X. “But of late, we’ve seen there’s a gradual improvement in score in the national examinations.”
Twenty-eight community primary schools in the district have already received infrastructure support from partner organisations and are, in Oryema’s words, “ready for coding” – the government process that formally absorbs a community school into the public system. His appeal to the national government is direct: fund the coding process and extend access further.
Getting parents back into the room
If there is one intervention Oryema credits most for the district’s improving numbers, it is the revival of the Annual General Meeting – a once-dormant tradition of head teachers and School Management Committees convening parents to report on how their children, and their schools, are doing.
“The first year I became the DEO here, we sat and we saw community participation was minimal,” Oryema recalls of 2024. “Then we say, how do we bring this community participation up? We instituted a compulsory AGM. Even for schools that had never conducted one, we told head teachers and SMCs to call parents and account to them.”
The turnout has climbed steadily since. Around 7,000 parents attended AGMs in the first year of the push. That rose to roughly 12,000, and by last year had reached close to 17,000 parents across the district’s schools. “It means the parents are getting to learn how to support their children,” Oryema says. “Because when they meet at school, they have a lot of discussions. This year, we are expecting more parents to go to different schools to attend AGM.”
The effect, he says, is visible even in something as simple as what time children leave for school. “Those days, when I start moving from Kampala in the morning, at around 5am, you will find children in Kampala already on the street going to school. But I will arrive in Nwoya when I find children are still going to school. That has reduced. When you come to our town here at 6am, you’ll find children already moving to school.”
Local leadership is backing the push. Area LC5 chairman Patrick Okello Oryema says his administration is working with non-state actors to build a “conducive environment for children at home” that supports what happens in the classroom.
On the ground, parents describe a shift in mindset taking hold among their neighbours. Margaret Ajok, who is raising four grandchildren in Patira East Village, Purongo Sub-county, says the change is collective. “My neighbours and I have really gotten a lot engaged in monitoring and supporting the education of our children,” she says.
For the DEO, the logic runs deeper than attendance sheets. “The greatest learning takes place at home. The teachers only do final beating,” says Oryema, using a local turn of phrase for finishing touches. “When you train your child very well from home, that child cannot fail in this system of education. But if the home does not give very good training to the child, even when you take the child to the best school in the world, that child will fail from there and come back home.”
What still stands in the way
The district’s gains sit alongside a staffing shortfall that Oryema does not shy away from citing. Nwoya currently employs 416 teachers across its 44 government schools – just 50.3 percent of the 827 the district is meant to have on the government payroll. That leaves a gap of 411 positions.
“The government has given us some little money. Recruitment is ongoing. Very soon, we shall increase about 30 teachers. Then, slowly, we shall close the gap,” Oryema says.
Physical infrastructure tells a similar story of partial progress. Classrooms, latrine stances, and staff housing all remain in short supply – the district has only about 200 units of staff housing to date.
Taken together, the seating charts at Olwiyo, the swelling AGM attendance figures, and the ten-point climb in PLE pass rates point to a district finding traction after years of slow starts. But Oryema’s own framing keeps the achievement in perspective: Nwoya is not declaring victory, it is closing gaps – in staffing, in infrastructure, in access, and in the attention paid to boys who have begun slipping quietly out of the classroom.
What seems to be working, on the evidence gathered here, is not one dramatic reform but an accumulation of smaller ones – a desk turned to face another desk, a meeting parents actually show up to, a head teacher willing to name where his own school’s approach has fallen short. In a young district still building its schools brick by brick, that incremental, self-critical kind of progress may be exactly what sustainable change looks like.