Ugandan pupils miss months of education

By Patience Atuhaire

Schools are not set to re-open in Uganda until January next year, that's once at least 10% of the population has been vaccinated against Covid-19.

There are millions of children in Uganda, especially those in rural areas, who have not been in a classroom, or had any interaction with a teacher, in about 18 months.

The lucky few have been able to continue studying online or accessing study material through newspapers and on TV.

Some parents have also devised ways to organise home schooling for their children, by having teachers come over, or children from the same neighbourhood going to a teacher’s house for lessons. But this is mostly for those in urban areas.

In 2020, when schools were first closed due to the pandemic, the government contemplated buying 10 million radio sets on which underprivileged children could listen to lessons. But a supplementary budget request submitted to parliament in November 2020, for their purchase, was rejected.

The government has said that children in public schools will be allowed to move to the next class when schools eventually reopen in January, but parents are doubtful if the learners would be able to catch up.

A rise in child rape and forced marriages, resulting in high numbers of teenage pregnancies witnessed since the pandemic begun, has also been blamed on the prolonged school closures which left children exposed.

President Yoweri Museveni argued in an address on Tuesday that although Covid-19 may not severely affect children, the majority of the pupils in the country are day-scholars and risk infecting their parents if they contract the virus in the process of travelling to and from school.

Teachers were included among the priority group for receiving vaccines when doses first arrived in the country in March. But out of 550,000 teachers across the country, only 96,000 have been fully vaccinated to date.

Reopening the education sector is now also dependant on the vaccination of students aged 18 and above.

Some analysts have argued that the prolonged closure of schools will worsen inequality in the country, especially between urban and rural populations.

This article originally appeared in BBC News.

Photo: AFP