The Minister of Education and Sports, Janet Museveni, signs a dummy of the World Bank report at the State Lodge in Nakasero on July Minister3, 2025. PHOTO/COURTESY OF MS MUSEVENI'S X HANDLE
A new report by the World Bank says Uganda spends the least funds on public education, far lower than other countries in the region.
The report released on Thursday by Education minister Janet Museveni at State Lodge in Nakasero in Kampala, says: “Uganda’s public expenditures on education is low and inefficient, which is constraining human capital growth.”
The findings, which also warned that many pupils are unable to complete the primary education cycle, advises that investment in the sector must be increased to effectively improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools. The report also says low foundational skills, high repetition rates, and high dropout rates are undermining Uganda’s education system.
The World Bank report shows that Uganda spent only 2.7 percent of its total budget in 2021, which was way below the average of 4.2 percent that other countries in the region were spending on public education.
“Uganda spends less per student than its peer countries at every level of education, but the gap is most pronounced at the primary level, where Uganda’s per-student expenditure is only one-third of the average for its regional peers.
“While Uganda’s education spending has grown modestly in inflation-adjusted terms in the past decade, this increase has mainly benefited higher education (43 percent of the additional resources) and central expenditures (24 percent),” the report says.
The report also states that Uganda’s public expenditures on education is not only low but also inefficient, pointing out a strong link between a country’s level of development, its expenditure, and its educational results.
“However, Uganda and its regional peers, except for Kenya, have lower learning-adjusted years of schooling than the average for countries at similar levels of development and with similar expenditure levels. Considering Uganda’s level of development and expenditure, its Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS) are 11 percent lower than what might have been expected,” the report says.
Financial burden
The low expenditure by the government, the report says, shifts the financial burden on households, exacerbating equity issues. For every Shs1,000 that the government invests in education, households spend Shs1,450, and the report says these household contributions as a share of GDP are higher than in most of Uganda’s peer countries but are still insufficient to bridge the funding gap.
The report also says the high fees that parents pay risks excluding children from poor families from enrolling in schools, and pointing out that Uganda has one of the highest school dropout rates in the region. The 2019/2020 Uganda National Household Survey (UNHS) showed that “no funding” or “too expensive” were the reasons cited by the most respondents for why learners had to drop out of school starting from P3 through the end of the secondary cycle.
Currently, pre-primary education is almost entirely privately financed, and as a result, only 17 percent of three to five-year-old children in the poorest quintile attend pre-primary schools, compared with 57 percent from the highest quintile, the report says. It adds that fees in Uganda’s Technical, Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector are also higher than in comparator countries.
Uganda’s Vision 2040 points out education as integral to building human capital, and the report says extensive international evidence has shown that education investments build human capital for the individual and the economy, contributing to increased earnings, labour productivity, and economic growth. “Urgent action is needed to ensure all children leave Uganda’s schools with literacy, numeracy, and other basic skills,” the report recommends.
The report says Uganda has a strong history of progressive and inclusive education policies, with the country being among the first African nations to adopt free primary education through its Universal Primary Education (UPE) policy in 1997, which boosted enrollment from 2.6 million in 1995 to 8.7 million by 2017.
The report says while UPE did not fully eliminate school fees or other household education costs in practice, it improved educational attainment, children’s health, employment outcomes and increased wealth. The 2025 World Bank report says some education-related indicators in National Development Plan (NDP) III are not on track to being achieved, and there is a lack of data on others and says obtaining timely data in the education sector has been a challenge given the poorly functioning Education Management Information System (EMIS).
Uganda’s basic education system faces three interlinked challenges: low foundational skills, high repetition rates, and high dropout rates,” the report says. The Uganda National Examinations Board (Uneb) 2023 National Assessment of Progress in Education (NAPE) Report found that 57 percent of Primary Six students had below minimum proficiency levels in English literacy and 42 percent had below minimum numeracy levels. The Uneb report says these figures are likely to understate the skills gap due to the high early dropout rate.
Pandemic effects
In March 2020, President Museveni announced the total lockdown of the country, closing all schools and public places, which lasted for 22 months, forcing children to remain at home. The 22 months were among the longest in the world for most students, which the report says largely erased any literacy gains achieved since 2016 when early grade reading programmes were introduced. The 2019/2020 UNHS found about one-third of P1 pupils to be over-age and 16 percent to be under-age, which the report said led to crowded classrooms, strained learning resources in the early grades, and contributed to grade repetition. “In 2019/2020, about 18 percent of P1 pupils were repeaters, 26 percent in government schools and seven percent in private schools.
The report says only 60 percent of children who start primary education in Uganda remain in school at the end of P7, mostly for reasons of cost. “High-stakes examination culture, including the Primary Leavers Examination contributes to the problem of low completion of primary school, by preventing low- performing students from progressing to secondary school,” the report says. The report further notes that while Uganda has made notable progress toward achieving universal primary enrolment, student retention is still a challenge.
It says the fact that Uganda’s gross attendance ratio exceeds 100 percent indicates that there is high over- age or under-age enrolment, which is inefficient. “Pre-primary enrolment is slightly below the average for Sub- Saharan Africa, but this rate may include children attending government primary schools, who are of pre-primary age and who are assigned to improvised pre-primary classes,” it says and adds that “secondary enrolment has stagnated due to rapid population growth.” Higher education, the report discloses, is only available to a small percentage of the population, although access has expanded as new universities have opened in under-served sub regions.
Private schools
For much of the time, the quality of teaching and learning in government-aided schools has gone down, forcing parents, who can afford, to send their children to private schools. A report by the non-profit organisation Uwezo on whether children are learning or not has consistently indicated that children are actually not learning, more especially in government schools where teachers are constantly battling low pay and supervision is at its lowest. The World Bank report says Ugandan students are much more likely than their regional peers to attend private institutions, and that during the 2019/2020 school year, only 62 percent of primary students attended government-aided institutions, well below the 92 percent average for Uganda’s peers in the region (Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania).
“For secondary education, only 43 per cent of students attended government schools, a rate that was half the regional average of 85 per cent. It is difficult to make direct comparisons between the performances of Uganda’s public and private schools because of differences in resource levels and in the characteristics of the students’ households,” the report says. The main educational equity gaps in Uganda are between higher-income and lower-income households, between rural and urban areas, and between refugee-hosting areas and the rest of the country. At every level, the report says children from better-off households are more likely to be enrolled in school, and the disparities grow larger at more advanced levels of education.
The World Bank’s 2023 Public Expenditure Review for Uganda found that government expenditures on primary education and TVET are progressive and pro-poor as they benefit lower-income students disproportionally, but their expenditures on other levels of education are regressive, with more resources going to higher-income households, with higher education being the most regressive. There are also substantial equity gaps in learning.
The 2023 NAPE found that literacy proficiency rates were 37 percentage points higher in urban areas than in rural areas in Primary Three, which was an increase from a 21 percent gap in 2018. “The gap widens as children move through the system, reaching 41 percentage points in literacy in P6,” according to the report.
