The exam result period is upon us.
Last week the Primary Leaving Exams (PLES) result were
released to much drama and fanfare. A trend has now been established, one that
has seen private schools overhaul the traditional schools atop the perch of
success.
In the New Vision index which employed the average aggregate
score of each school as a measure of success it took until the Mugwanya
Preparatory School in 161st position to see a “traditional” school.
And it didn’t do badly at all managing 8.896 aggregate average for its 125
candidates.
"Assuming an investment of at least a billion shillings a school, you are looking at least sh160b investment in schools which was not there 10, 20 to 30 years ago...
It’s no secret that the investment in education in Uganda
over the last three decades has been humongous.
Going by the success of these schools – academically and financially,
I think we are fast approaching a saturation point. The competition is already
intense and school proprietors using every trick book in the book – drilling
the kids into examination automatons, culling underachievers and even blatant
cheating are pushing the limits, but it will get even more intense.
The challenge of course is that these schools are mostly in
the hands of businessmen, which is not a bad thing in itself except that they
are mostly driven by the profit motive than creating well rounded individuals.
But first a brief diversion.
About 20 years ago a UNDP study identified education as one
of seven sectors where Uganda has or can develop a strong competitive
advantage. The others were health, agro-processing, ICT services, tourism, financial
services and mining.
Education was singled out because the language of
instruction is English and we have an easily adaptable system, whose output is
in demand in a region where the education infrastructure is broken down or
non-existent altogether.
It is already happening but our school proprietors need to
be incentivised to think beyond our borders, in a systematic and sustainable
way.
"But before we do that we need to standardise our curriculum, beef up our teacher education and enforce basic standards across the board...
We can take lessons from North East Asia’s success in
developing an export driven economy over the last 70 years.
The original Asian tigers of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan
rather than frown upon the profit motive of the private sector, first took time
to understand its workings and then sought to leverage those same
“shortcomings” to achieve their developmental goals.
Key to this was the insistence on export discipline and
private sector competition.
These countries not only encouraged private sector
competition, that’s why Japan and South Korea have multiple car makers, but
pegged any state intervention or subsidies to their ability to compete in the
international market.
Private sector competition as opposed to centralised
planning, leads to innovation and cost effectiveness. And pegging subsidies to
international market acceptance does away with the crony capitalism, because
the international markets do not care whose relative you are in deciding to buy
or not to buy your products. The combination produced ever improving products
at affordable prices.
Education, arguably Uganda’s most developed sector, even
more developed than coffee, because it churns out finished products at various
levels, we can test this. It is both a matter of survival for our schools and
the nation.
The aforementioned saturation of the market means that
schools will or are already falling by the wayside. A situation we cannot
afford as there is still a need to educate millions of children well into the
future to achieve our developmental ambitions.
So let government support the export of educational
services.
They can start by laying down the criteria for schools they
will support in terms of infrastructure, teacher-student ratios, scope of what
they can offer and extra-curricular activities.
In addition to existing tax benefits schools can benefit
from they will enjoy other incentives, maybe higher asset depreciation rates
than schools that don’t qualify to the extent that they have foreign students
in their schools.
"Apart from bumping up our export numbers these schools will also raise the standard of our education for local students as our teacher education will be improved and curriculum beefed up. Also one can expect improvements will climb up the ladder not only making the country a regional education hub but also improving the quality of education available to more Ugandans than those who can afford to fly out...
It’s a potential gold mine for investors and the government
that we are seating on here.
If we can do it with education we can then roll it out to
health, ICT, financial services, tourism, agro-processing and mining.
Why not?
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