Affirmative action should benefit girls in rural areas

Emilly C. Maractho

The 2020 Uganda Certificate of Education (UCE) exam results were released last week and more girls than boys sat the papers.
Great news for advocates of gender parity. We can be counted among countries that may achieve gender parity in education. How well we have done! We can celebrate that we will most likely meet the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal of ensuring that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education by 2030, if we keep going.
However, as the results started pouring in through our social media pages, I was impressed by some schools getting 99 per cent in Division One.
At my old school, the headteacher shared the results with the old girls on our page. He informed us that this was the best result in seven years. We were excited. “One in Division One and Seven in Division Two. The rest were in Division Three and Four”. And for those who have been trying to make a difference in the school, this was truly exciting.
My old school is the story of most schools that used to produce good students back in the day. It also tells of how the achievements in education today mask deeper disparities in enrolment, retention and academic performance marked by geography, class and gender.
Last week, I talked about the inequality that PLE breeds, in general. But if we look further into the data, we will find that even for girls, there are reasons to worry about these disparities. We now understand that even provision of education for all does not deal with exclusion of the marginalised.
Stories of girls in Karamoja who slave away in the mining business instead of going to school paints a clearer picture of that disparity. Yet, this is not just a Ugandan problem when it comes to girls’ education and inequality in educational outcomes. I recently read an article published in 2017 that was profound. According to Professor Pauline Rose, “education is a fundamental human right, but moving between that undeniable statement and on-the-ground change is a long and complex process”.
She notes that “education is at the heart of social transformation – it increases opportunities in life, can pull people out of poverty, empower women and drive economic growth. Understanding the barriers that prevent this happening is crucial.”
Rose is professor of International Education and the director of the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.
Their research that focuses on several developing countries suggests that children need to be able to access primary and secondary school because there’s little point in being in school if children don’t learn the skills they need. She explains that “while this needs to happen for all children, we know that it is often girls from poor households who are the most disadvantaged when it comes to completing education.”
I think of the girls we are celebrating at my old school for producing the best result in seven years, at St Peter’s SS, a girl’s school that my mother attended, and several women from my community. For these girls, poverty, underage marriage or pregnancy stare them in the face every day and is more of their reality than education. The struggle of the school administration to work within a complex context in education to produce results is often laid bare.
And, most of us old girls have to deal with what President Museveni has called ‘the pressure of poverty’ from our communities, although that pressure has not made us corrupt. So for close to three years now, we have been contributing to buy a school bus, because the school is hard to reach. We remain faithful to the cause, but the money comes in faint drops.
There is no silver bullet as they say, to these challenges. But Ministry of Education is a good starting point, where we can make a difference.  Our Constitution provides for affirmative action for the purpose of addressing imbalances created by history, tradition, and custom.  The current culture of education makes it clear that some schools need affirmative action and special support to ensure access to quality education for a community. Affirmative action should mean something in education for girls in rural areas through community engagement programmes. That is where government’s effort should be put as a matter of policy.
The other thing the Ministry of Education can do is use the performance data and do trend analysis to budget for special programmes which strengthens accountability of schools and policymakers at the local level. Our education system must create critical impact.  As Prof Rose says, ‘it’s not that poor children can’t learn. It’s that the conditions that affect whether they go to school and stay in education are much worse”. The point of education policy and action should be to make those conditions better for all children to access quality education.
Ms Maractho (PhD) is the head and senior lecturer, Department of Journalism and Media Studies at UCU.  
[email protected]