Uganda using outdated text books - Unesco

KAMPALA. A new global education monitoring report by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), has listed Uganda among countries using outdated secondary school textbooks that misrepresent key priorities in achieving sustainable development goals.
The report states that many textbooks used in Uganda, Kenya, Algeria, France, Italy, Spain, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Zimbabwe show women in submissive or traditional roles, including cleaning and serving men.
While the report recognises that textbook revision should be done every five to 10 years, this is rarely done, with many students fed on out-of-date information that doesn’t meet the current global needs, including human rights, gender equality, environmental concern and global citizenship.
Titled: ‘Textbooks pave the way to sustainable development’, the report in part states: “Only 14 per cent of textbooks from 2000-2011 mention immigrant and refugee rights and despite the explicit messages advocating against gender inequality, gender bias remains a major problem. Only 30 per cent of textbooks discussed environmental issues as a global problem.”
But National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) officials yesterday said they are handicapped after government trashed the revised lower secondary curriculum that was due for implementation. Ms Bernadette Karuhanga, the NCDC deputy executive director, said they have been advised to drop their earlier proposal of reducing 43 subjects to eight learning areas and instead maintain the current subject-based teaching approach but reduce them to 14 subjects.
The current secondary school curriculum has never been revised since inception. This will be the first major reform government will undertake.
“We have been advised to go back to subjects instead of learning areas we had proposed. We will still focus more on activity and that is when we can come up with the textbooks to use,” Ms Karuhanga said.
Dr Aaron Benavot, the director of Unesco’s Global Education monitoring report, asked governments to be conscious of the kind of textbooks being used in schools because they convey core values of each society.
“ Governments simply don’t realise just how out of touch their textbooks are,” Dr Benavot said.
On December 21, NCDC officials met President Museveni, his wife and minister of Education Janet Museveni and vice chancellors of Uganda’s public universities and agreed to revisit the curriculum review that has been ongoing for almost a decade.
While the proposed amendments were expected to be rolled out this year, it is not clear now when the process will start. The vice chancellors are expected to work with a six-member committee that is yet to be established. Sources who preferred anonymity said the body in charge of reviewing the country’s education curriculum doesn’t have the money to meet the current directive.
Already, the Education ministry budget projections for the Financial Year 2017/18 have been slashed by almost two per cent. This, among other things, is expected to affect some of the ministry’s priorities.
The World Bank has been the major funder of this project, but sources say the government failed to meet its counterpart funding in the last two financial years. NCDC needed $55 million (Shs165b) to roll out the curriculum with $45m (Shs135b) coming from World Bank.
The Unesco policy paper that was released on December 28 looked at secondary school textbooks in history, civics, social studies and geography. The materials were drawn from the Georg Eckert Institute in Germany, which holds the most extensive collection of textbooks from around the world in the subjects.

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