Tayebwa calls for school census to fight ‘ghost’ pupils
Pupils of Good Hope Mixed Day and Boarding Primary School enjoy packed food at break time. Even with a remarkable steady increase in literacy rates, nearly seven million Ugandans, representing 19.3 per cent of the total population, have never been to school. File photo
What you need to know:
- Ms Margaret Makoha, the chairperson Uganda Parliamentary Forum for Children, urged the government to prioritise early childhood development, saying a lot of money is spent on universal education forgetting the critical stage of zero to eight years.
The Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Mr Thomas Tayebwa, has called for internal audits in public schools to eliminate “ghost” students.
Mr Tayebwa said the government is losing a lot of money through funding non-existing learners in public schools that could cover the funding gap in the education sector.
“Just like we have done audits for human resources in the country, we need to do serious audits for our students in these schools. The huge amount of money we are losing to “ghost” students would help to cover most of these costs,” Mr Tayebwa said.
He was speaking during the orientation meeting for MPs on early childhood development in Kampala yesterday.
Mr Tayebwa said the census of students should be on the same day and time, arguing that schools swap learners to top up the missing numbers.
“What is surprising is that in villages, private schools are cheaper than public schools because there is a lot of corruption where the registered numbers are not the exact ones on the ground,” the Deputy Speaker said.
However, Mr Tayebwa called for increased funding for universal education both at primary and secondary levels to make it entirely free.
He also called for a law to protect the inter-sex children in the country, saying they had been left behind.
According to Mr Tayebwa, most of them are stigmatised.
“Most of them are looked at as a curse in the community and even killed, so such people, the albinos, the inter-sex are disabilities that have not been brought forward and I would ask colleagues to look into it and see how best they can be helped,” he said.
Mr Tayebwa said the country has more than 300,000 inter-sex people and it’s unfortunate they were included by the gay community.
“They came to me saying they want us to look into the law we passed but we showed them what we passed, they were never touched, and we never criminalised any activity of an intersex person. I will interest you in studying these groups and we see how we can help them, especially on policy and how we can fund their treatment and surgeries. The doctors who accompanied them from Mulago hospital said these are easy operations, especially if identified early,” the Deputy Speaker said.
Other education needs
Ms Margaret Makoha, the chairperson Uganda Parliamentary Forum for Children, urged the government to prioritise early childhood development, saying a lot of money is spent on universal education forgetting the critical stage of zero to eight years.
“Science says that the human brain develops from zero to eight years, so if you miss out on this critical age then it means that, as we target Primary one at six years, you will be targeting the brain which has missed a stage of stimulation,” she said.
Ms Makoha called for a budget for childhood development. Mr Rogers Golooba, a senior probation officer at the Ministry of Gender, called for integration of pre-primary education in public schools.
“Although the government recognises that primary is the first level of education, access to pre-primary education is still very low. In most regions, attendance levels are less than 30 percent,” he said.
