| dc.description.abstract | Executive Summary
This Education and Sports Sector Analysis (ESSA) aims to provide an assessment of the current state of the education and sports sector in Uganda, to serve as input for the development of the new Uganda Education and Sports Sector Strategic Plan (ESSP) 2020/21-2025/26. The ESSA starts with a description of the country context (Chapter 1) and the overall education sector context (Chapter 2). Chapter 3 describes recent trends and the current status of the sub-sectors of the education system: pre-primary education; primary education; secondary education; business, technical and vocational education and training (BTVET); and higher education. This chapter similarly describes the trends and status of the physical education and sports sub-sector. The subsequent three chapters address key dimensions of the education system that affect and determine the performance of all education sub-sectors: teacher development and management (Chapter 4), fourteen key cross-cutting issues, namely: special needs and inclusive education; girls education; gender-based violence, sexual abuse and exploitation and safe school environment; education provision to refugees; school feeding; water sanitation and hygiene (WASH); guidance and counseling; monitoring and evaluation system; the education monitoring information system (EMIS); inspection and support supervision; HIV/AIDS; information and communication technology (ICT); disaster risk management; and environment protection (Chapter 5) and education costs and financing (Chapter 6).
As per Uganda's Vision 2040, the country's education and sports sector operates in an environment that is gearing up to transforming the country into a lower-middle-income country (LMIC). It is foreseen that this stage in the country's development will be characterized by a vibrant industry and service sector, where economic growth and the creation of good and decent jobs are expected to be boosted by the development of, among others, the oil and gas, tourism, and ICT sectors. Education is considered a critical pillar to national development since it is meant to generate the required competent human capital. At the same time, the country's current socio-economic context has some features that are typical of a low-income country (LIC). This includes incidences of poverty, as in 2016/17, 21.4% of the population was living under the international poverty line of US$ 1.90 per day, and a relatively large number of citizens lives just above the poverty line with high vulnerability to poverty in case of adverse shocks. It also includes weak performance in key human development indicators related to education i.e. a low-skilled workforce (over half of the Ugandan working-age population has not completed primary education [UNHS 2016/17]); and a labor market where most of the jobs are in agriculture and the informal sector.
Uganda's education and sports sector is, therefore, faced by the challenge of resolving education features associated with lower-income countries, such as achieving the education-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while at the same time preparing the workforce for a dynamic labor market that requires an appropriate mix of increasingly sophisticated cognitive, technical and socio-emotional skills. This challenge is exacerbated by Uganda's demographic trends, as the population growth continues to exert pressure on service delivery, including the provision of education. An additional challenge that is very specific to Uganda relates to the refugee community in the country. Uganda hosts the largest number of refugees in Africa and has a progressive policy framework that grants access to free education and training for the refugee population.
Uganda is susceptible to highly devastating disasters, including drought, floods, landslides and rampant lightning, hazards that affect its population and impose a high socio-economic cost. Over the past decades, the disasters have increased in frequency, length, intensity, and geographical spread.
The ESSA shows that Uganda's education and sports sector has achieved substantial progress. Notable achievements and developments include, among others, the strong increase in enrolment in primary education (with Gross Enrolment Rate reaching 111% in 2017) and in BTVET (for which enrolment nearly tripled between the years 2012/13 and 2018/19). Uganda, overall, also performs well on some key gender indicators. For example, the latest school census data show no major difference in primary school enrolment between boys and girls at the national level. Gender parity indices look less positive when they are disaggregated by region or by wealth quintile. In addition to these positive trends related to access, several reforms and initiatives are underway and are expected to improve the quality and relevance of education and training. These reforms include the recent adoptions of the National Teacher Policy and the TVET policy, and the on-going curriculum reforms in primary and lower secondary education.
There are important areas where the strong efforts of the government, in collaboration with its partners, have yet to result in significantly improved performance. Importantly, to make significant progress in achieving the SDGs on universal primary and secondary education completion, both the primary education survival rate and the transition rate to secondary education need to improve substantially. Currently, only three out of ten pupils who start the first year of primary education (P1), reach the final year of primary education (P7), and the transition rate from primary to secondary education has declined from 72% in 2013 to 61% in 2017. Meeting the SDGs will also require the government to address access-related challenges of the more vulnerable population groups, particularly children from poor and rural households, and girls in those areas where gender- parity has proven hard to achieve. Overall, access needs to be increased to pre-primary education, which currently caters for only one out of five children, and to secondary education, where the gross enrolment rate (GER) is below the rates found in neighboring countries. For example, in lower secondary, Uganda's GER stands at 43%, 46% in Burundi, 57% in Tanzania, and 61% in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Access to non-formal education including short-term skills training needs to be expanded to ease the transition to the labor market for adolescents with low formal education.
In addition to access, the ESSA identifies the quality of education as another challenge to Uganda's education and sports sector. Thus, improving the quality of education will need to be another priority for Uganda's education system. The quality and relevance of education and training need to be strengthened across the education system to ensure that the education and sports sector makes its expected contribution to Vision 2040 by providing all Ugandans with the cognitive, technical, and soft skills required in an increasingly sophisticated economy. The on-going reforms and interventions in BTVET to transform the training system into a truly demand-responsive mechanism are appropriate, but will need to be increased. Better preparation of Uganda's future workforce for a modern and dynamic labor market requires achieving quality improvements in primary and secondary education. At the moment, the level of literacy and numeracy skills of Uganda's primary 4 pupils are below those of comparator countries like Kenya and Tanzania. In secondary education, student performance in English and Mathematics as measured by the National Assessment of Progress in Education has declined substantially in recent years. Improvements in teacher development and management will be crucial to strengthen the quality of education in primary and secondary education. In higher education, the number of institutions and students has increased substantially. In the decade from 2006/07 to 2016/17, the student population has nearly doubled. To ensure that investments in higher education of both households and the government yield the highest possible returns, it will be important to ensure that higher education programs are aligned with labor market demands.
A recurrent theme across all sub-sectors of the education system relates to financial constraints which prevent the achievement of the twin objectives of increasing access and at the same time strengthening quality and relevance. Whereas inefficiencies in service delivery partly cause these financial constraints, it is also the case that public resources allocated to education are relatively low and declining. Public expenditures on education were 11.4% of the national budget in the last FY 2018/19 and are projected to be 10.5% in current FY 2019/20, compared to 13.5% in 2014/15. This is substantially below the internationally recommended share of 15-20% of the national budget and can be considered particularly challenging against the backdrop of Uganda's rapidly growing population. Due to Uganda's relatively low public expenditure, there is a high level of household expenditures on education. According to the UIS data, Ugandan households contribute close to two- thirds of overall expenditures in education. A breakdown by sub-sector shows that households tend to cover the full cost of pre-primary education and approximately 70% of the total cost for both upper secondary education and higher education. In relation to physical education and sports, the ESSA notes the important role of physical education within the formal education system. Access to physical education seems to be uneven and dependent on the financial resources of schools. The promotion and development of out-of-school sports activities and sports excellence among Ugandans is a role that has been reserved for the National Council of Sports and Uganda's Sports Associations and Sports' Federations. In recent years, various initiatives have been introduced to facilitate and incentivize internationally competitive athletes. | en_US |
