Uganda Education Statistical Abstract 2002

Abstract

Introduction A BACKGROUND The annual education census exercise allows the Ministry of Education and Sports to collect all the necessary information about education in Uganda. This information is used as an input to the planning and monitoring of the provision of quality and relevant education to Ugandans. It is intended that the census should address the information needs of all stakeholders. In its efforts to improve on the timeliness, accuracy reliability and availability of information to various users, the Ministry of Education and Sports, in 1999, embarked on the design and implementation of a sector Educational Management Information System (EMIS) in which the district would be the focal point. The Ministry contracted M/S AED/Africon to design and implement EMIS both by developing the necessary software and re-engineering practices and procedures. B DATA GATHERING In February 2001 a workshop was conducted with District Education Officers, Chief Administrative Officers and Ministry officials as well as the Education Funding Agencies Group members and other categories of stakeholders. This workshop was, among other things, designed to determine their information needs. In addition, an assessment of the usefulness and relevance of existing data and reports was made. Following these two activities, questionnaires and instructional manuals for the census 2002 were designed and circulated for comments. The questionnaires were then distributed to schools, accompanied by detailed sets of instructions. These instructions cover all major definitions, the process, the responsible agents and the expected length of time for each major step. Several new features were added to the Annual Census 2002 as follows: (i) Pre-labeled questionnaires (3 copies) for each school with a unique 14 digit school number- new schools not known from 2001 were assigned a unique number at data capture stage: Formal tallies on the Census sheet for tracking length of time in transit; (ii) Summary totals for teachers and students - Quick Counts, available very soon after the questionnaires were returned to MOES; (iii) Individual enumeration of all teachers with links to Ministry of Public Service payroll code; Additional teacher information including skills, previous post, and pay grade; Control totals on all major information parts. (vii) A section on capture of school ownership was re-defined to capture ownership of school on which the school is located. (viii) Also the capture of classrooms' data was based on completed classrooms, classrooms under construction and classrooms needed and classrooms in use as were the case in year 2001. C METHODOLOGY In an effort to decentralize the data gathering, processing and utilization to districts District Education Officers, District Inspectors of Schools and Education Officers/Inspectors of Schools in charge of counties were intensively involved. About 300 personnel underwent intensive training in Kampala and were expected to directly transfer the knowledge gained to head teachers in their counties with whom they have direct contact. Furthermore, there were two sessions of trainings for both district and Municipality officials in areas of EMIS navigation and office automation. This training was conducted between May and August of 2001. This is part of the plan to decentralize EMIS through capacity building. This training: (i) Improved the knowledge and appreciation of the exercise by all personnel, (ii) Resulted in high quality training of head teachers, (iii) Allowed MOES to hand out the Annual Census 2002 documents directly to DEOS and 200 County Inspectors of Schools. During the entire data collection exercise the Ministry of Education and Sports was in charge of monitoring and supervision nationally. District officials supervised and monitored the exercise in their districts, collated the completed questionnaires and returned them to the MOES. D DATA PROCESSING Data entry was done by data entry clerks hired to specifically input data under the supervision of the Ministry of Education and Sports staff in close collaboration with the consultants. ED ASSIST software was used to enter data. During data entry only questionnaires without errors were entered and incorrectly filled questionnaires were either referred to respondents or edited by MOES staff. This was to ensure that the quality of entered data was high and to limit the time spent on data cleaning. In the reports produced, two columns of pupil: classroom ratios were displayed. One ratio was for the pupil to classroom in use and the other for pupil to complete. New districts were introduced into the system since there were 3 new districts born to the old districts.