Tuesday, January 22, 2019

LET US AIM FOR A HIGHER STANDARD


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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