| dc.description.abstract | ActionAid with funding from Hills and Cooks families has been implementing the Hills project in four schools in Gogonyo sub county Pallisa district for the past two years. The Hills project aimed at increasing education financing to increase access to quality public education for children from poor households in rural areas. The project specifically aimed at addressing education inequality by promoting the following:
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Increased awareness of the rights to free quality education by the children and parents.
Increased accountability in the delivery of free quality public education.
Existence of earmarked funds for free and quality education.
Existence of legislation and policies to improve public education and regulate private providers of education.
The Hills project was first initiated as a research and during the research, conducted in Gogonyo sub- county Pallisa district; one of the issues that came up was that public education financing was not sufficient to meet the standards of a quality education. There were a lot of challenges these schools were facing, poor infrastructure, teacher pupil ratio was very low and schools were run without any plans.
These challenges gave ActionAid a pointer that it needed to do something to address issues affecting education and four schools were selected with the aim of, improving performance, increasing retention, and reducing teacher pupil ratio among others.
The project is being implemented in Gogonyo sub- county as a pilot in four primary schools namely, Ajepet, Akuoro, Kachango and Gogonyo Primary Schools and we have been engaging with different stakeholders, teachers, parents, pupils, school management committee, education officials and district and local leadership. We have been supporting the district to increase public education financing for schools and building the capacity of schools to come up with school improvement plans so that they have a systematic way to improve performance and infrastructure development. We have also been working with the children and parents to create awareness among them about their right to free quality education and the responsibility of parents towards the We have also been helping them understand the connection between the taxes they pay and education so that they can be motivated to pay taxes and for accountability.
We have seen milestones and achievements in the four schools we are working in: these four schools have come up with school improvement plans and most of them have been able to improve on their infrastructure and use them for lobbying for more funds.
One of the biggest challenges that has been contributing to the poor education standards in Pallisa district has been lack of enough teachers in public schools. However, because of constant lobbying by ActionAid and communities, this year Pallisa district passed a budget of close to one billion shillings to carter for recruitment of teachers and nurses.
Another achievement of the project is increased awareness, parents and children are now able to demand for accountability of UPE funds. Before, schools would finish a year without holding any meeting but in the four schools, they hold annual Parent Teachers Association (PTA) meetings and management provides accountability. They also display accountability on their notice boards for everyone to see. These practices have also been adopted by nearby schools.
We also provided suggestion boxes for the children to freely speak and demand for accountability from the teachers by dropping their grievances in the suggestion box.
Parents are more interested and involved in the school affairs they contribute to the school feeding programmes either financial or in kind and this have led to increased retention of pupils in school and their concentration during lessons. education of their children so that they can contribute in any way to improvement in the learning performance of the school. One of the lessons we have learnt from implementing this project is that education performance can improve if all the stakeholders are involved and if well financed. With the coming of UPE, parents had a misconception that government was solely responsible for the education of their children. The Hills project has shown that involvement of key stakeholders increased child retention and improved performance. We learnt that if we mobilize all the stakeholders to have interest and get involved then we get improved financing and performance.
Previously schools would charge development fee and most of the parents could not afford and they prioritized boy education over the girl child but with the Hills project, we learnt that if government meets much of the financing burden, then parents can also encourage girl child education. The presidential directive halting the charging of development fees if followed will be a massive boost to our efforts. The project has also taught us that as parents understand why they pay taxes they are motivated to demand for accountability and increased education financing. In the areas that the project is being implemented, there is increased accountability and transparency because the increased awareness and involvement of parents and pupils in the day to day running of schools. | en_US |
