How many learners have returned to school?

On January 10, Uganda finally ended the world’s longest school closure. Although Uganda ranks nowhere in the most Covid-19- affected countries, leadership in the country found it rational to close schools for the longest time in the world -- virtually two years.

The rationale for such a long closure is something I would like to read or listen to. Because schools were unnecessarily closed for a very long time, significant risk for learners not to return to school was created.

And, despite the long school closure, our leaders made very insignificant efforts to keep learners in books. A study in April 2021, by the Forum for African Women Educationalists found that for over half of the country’s 15 million school learners, education had stopped entirely, with primary school children the worst hit. I even suspect that for the vast majority of learners who kept learning, it was for their parents’ efforts, not government.

Because it’s true that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, learners who had reached puberty and those who reached it within the lockdown, became more sexually active.

The government’s health data shows that cases of pregnancy among girls aged 10-14 more than quadrupled between March 2020, when the schools were first closed, and September 2020.

If we assume that pregnancies among girls of the same age group grew at the same rate from September 2020 to January 10, 2022, we can conclude that pregnancy cases that were recorded in September 2020 have now more than quadrupled too. Uganda’s National Planning Authority estimated in August 2021, that 30 percent of all the country’s learners would not be going back to school due to teenage pregnancies, early marriages, and child labour.

It’s certainly not possible that between August 2021(when the National Planning Authority estimated the 30 per ent) and January 10, 2022(the date when learners resumed school), cases of teenage pregnancies, early marriages, and child labour didn’t occur. Therefore, the percentage of learners which hasn’t reported back to school for the same reasons could be higher than 30 percent.

There are, of course, other learners who haven’t reported back to school for different reasons -- financial, lost interest, demolished, closed or collapsed schools etc. In Uganda, it’s possible for a learner to stop schooling because a specific school has been demolished.

There are sub-counties with only one school and if that school gets demolished, some learners (especially the young and physically weak ones) may find it impossible to trek long distances. Projections are always flawed.

And knowing my country’s attention to detail, I’m inclined to believe that our projections are even more flawed. Now that learners have resumed schooling, shouldn’t our government have a responsibility of picking interest in the actual national learner turnout, instead of relying on some projections that were made during lockdown?

Some diligent media houses, in the interest of informing, could have helped but I doubt any Ugandan media house has the requisite resources and structures to compile the statistics independently. For government, it could be as simple as passing a directive that all school heads should submit statistics regarding their school learner turnout to their respective District Education Officers.

Statistics from DEOs can be collected by Uganda National Bureau of Statistics ( UBOS) officials for final tallying. From government, we should, therefore, expect to know which region registered the lowest and highest learner turnout and if possible, corresponding reasons too.

Knowing total learner turnout in different regions will help government to identify most affected regions and therefore intensify campaigns to keep learners in school in those regions. It will also help inform other policies and decisions as education is a very crucial and ever-demanding sector.

Moses Baguma, [email protected]