KAMPALA: Abigail Mukisa sells men’s clothes in one of the city’s arcades. She has eight children. All five of the children are in the lower classes, while three are in university. According to Mukisa, she takes care of the five lower learners while her husband takes care of those in university.
On average, Mukisa earns 30,000 shillings daily, which she splits into her daily expenses and the education of the five lower learners. According to Mukisa, she doesn’t want her children to miss anything when it comes to education, despite her meagre earnings, especially after the lockdown.
Mukisa is worried about the school requirements as schools prepare to open for the second term next week. She explains that some of the requirements cost more than half of the tuition she pays for her children.
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According to Mukisa, school requirements are becoming a headache for her. Her biggest concern is preprimary schools that ask her for reams of paper on a termly basis. Mukisa says that she could understand this if it was for upper primary and secondary children, but she has failed to come to terms with the demands for preprimary.
She explains that besides the school supplies and personal requirements like clothes, she also has to buy sugar, rice, and soap as part of the requirements, yet the fees are also high. When asked why she has never considered enrolling her children in the universal education programs financed by the government, Mukisa says that the quality of education given in government schools is lacking, yet they also demand similar requirements.
Mukisa is not alone. Ruth Nabagala, the wife of a boda boda rider in Kampala with six children, says that they cannot save anything for the future of their children or even think about building their own house soon. My husband and I never had a chance of getting an education, and now we want our children to have it. We cannot take them to universal education because it is not a solution to our dream, “says Nabagala.
According to Nabagala, all her five children go to the same school. She explains that before paying tuition, they are required to clear school requirements valued at 100,000 paid separately. This means the couple spends 500,000 on requirements alone per term before they think about tuition.
Justine Akello, considered to be well off in her community, says that the government needs to help. She shared a circular stating the school fees and requirements needed in a government-aided school where the children go. These include fees for textbooks, computer programs, lab equipment, library reference books, games and sports, sports day, and internal audits, among others.
Filbert Baguma, the secretary-general of Uganda National Teachers Unions (UNATU), says that schools are pushing parents to the extremes when it comes to requirements. He says parents need to wake up and have a strong voice on such issues that can be respected by both schools and the government.
According to Baguma, government schools should not be asking for more than scholastic materials and personal requirements in the case of a boarding school. Asadu Kirabira, the chairperson of the National Private Educational Institutions Associations in Uganda, says schools ask for requirements depending on their standards.
He notes that it is up to the parents to choose which school they can afford to take their children to. However, Kirabira notes that there is a need for schools to involve parents to reach a consensus on the costs.
According to the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER), a civil organization, both private and public schools demand unnecessary requirements such as toilet paper, reams of paper, brooms, and rags, among others, on top of school fees. They add that this has, in the long run, prevented many learners from returning to school as the requirements are an additional cost to school fees and burdensome to the parents and learners.
Recently, ISER sued the government for alleged failure to put in place a legal framework to regulate school dues and requirements. In their application before the High Court Civil Division in Kampala, ISER, together with Michael Aboneka and Andrew Karamagi, both lawyers, want the High Court to compel the Minister of Education and Sports to immediately exercise her mandate to draft a policy that will regulate school fees and all dues payable at schools and tertiary institutions in the country.
