Would it make a difference if Uganda looked at its school dropout disaster in monetary terms?

Earlier this week, I met with two friends, both of them solving Uganda’s elephantine problem from different angles. One of the key points from that conversation was the ticking time bomb that is Uganda’s astronomical school dropout rates. It is not a new conversation, yet the reason it keeps cropping up is that, unlike the mothers who are dying in childbirth, there doesn’t seem to be much headway in dealing with school dropouts.

Later in the week, I sent out a tweet that has kind of gone viral. It alerted the world to one of the most devastating statistics to come out of Uganda every year. I said, “In 2017, 1,866,657 children enrolled in Primary One. Tomorrow, 749,371 registered candidates are expected to sit their first Primary Leaving Examination. We have “lost” 1,117,286 children (about 60 percent) in just seven years.”

10 years ago, the completion rate at the primary school level was 38 percent (meaning that 72 percent of children were dropping out before completing primary school. That number is said to have fallen to 68 percent, which gives you a completion rate of 42 percent. Those stats are unacceptable. Yet, they have been near-consistent for the last 10 years.

However, they are indicative of the turmoil that our socio-political and economic scenes have been experiencing in the last decade or so. The long queues at the airport heading to Saudi Arabia, and everywhere else, the increase in all manner of crime, political agitation, and related violence, a burgeoning informal sector, the boda-boda takeover, and the fact that now more than ever, everyone complains about an economy that just can’t seem to put money in their pockets.

And that is the point here. Primary school education is the most basic of all the levels – regardless of the quality. We must at the very least keep the majority in the system if we are going to make something, anything worthwhile of them. When we fail at that, we are not just making it hard for ourselves to find the right and very best professionals to fix the nuts and bolts of our economy. We are creating a critical mass of citizens to break and unscrew whatever is being put together.

There are of course arguments that the situation might not be as dire as is presented. That this being Uganda, we cannot debate statistics of this nature without accounting for “ghosts”. The argument here is that some crafty government officials and head teachers inflate the enrolment figures to make a killing from the accruing Capitation Grant that the government disburses to cater to learners under the Universal Primary Education scheme.

This might be true but not to the extent of an estimated close to 10 million learners in the last decade. It is also negated by UBOS’ statistics which indicate that a whopping 42 percent of youth are not in employment, education, or training. They are, as Ugandans love to say, just there. In the short-term, the net effect of that is reflected – partly – in the recently published Equal Opportunities Commission report, which reveals that access to lucrative top government jobs is skewed to the West (particularly the Ankole region).

I haven’t but it is easy to also surmise, given other corroborating data, that the number of children who are staying in or dropping out of school follows the same regional trends. In the long run, this is bad for business. It means that we do not have the human resource capital required to drive the economy. It also means that we cannot muscle the required purchasing power to make consumerism and mass production targeting the local market viable.

It also means that inevitably, we are creating a recipe where millions of citizens will continue to exert pressure on public services and expenditures that they can’t contribute to. The problem is right there before us.

Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds.

@Rukwengye