COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS Fifty-sixth sessionItem 10 of the provisional agenda
ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS

Report submitted by Ms. Katarina Tomaševski, Special Rapporteur on the right to education Addendum Mission to Uganda
26 June - 2 July 1999

Executive summary    [ Go to Contents ]

The Special Rapporteur on the right to education visited Uganda from 26 June to 2 July 1999 upon the invitation of the Government. The objectives of the visit were to assess the realization of the right to education, especially experiences with universal primary education (UPE), introduced in 1997, in reducing financial obstacles impeding access to school, and to analyze the mainstreaming of human rights and gender into the policy and practice of the Government and the international creditor and/or donor community with regard to education. The Special Rapporteur, accompanied by a staff member of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), had numerous meetings with governmental actors, multilateral and bilateral agencies working in the field of education, gender and human rights, as well as non-governmental organizations and academic institutions.

The Special Rapporteur has applied human rights impact assessment to debt relief, structural adjustment and aid policies. This is deemed a suitable method for identifying and remedying negative impact and the first step towards mainstreaming human rights into international cooperation. The Special Rapporteur has found that Uganda's debt repayment takes precedence over its human rights obligations, thus undermining the priority required to be accorded them under international law. The increased political and financial support to UPE is a promising sign of greater international and domestic attention to creating a basis for effective recognition of the right to education. Integration of human rights into the sectoral strategy for education has been facilitated by the success of UPE. This has created an environment for translating the right to education into a reality instead of being perceived, as it often is, as a gift. The political commitment and the priority which UPE enjoys in aid and budgetary allocations provide the opportunity for designing the legal framework necessary to sustain primary education after donors' financial support and the accompanying conditionalities come to an end.

The Special Rapporteur has applied her "4-A scheme" (availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability) to analyze human rights obligations corollary to the right to education. She noted the huge challenge which Uganda is facing in ensuring the availability of schools and teachers for its youthful population. Securing access to school for girls has been prioritized, while the shift to inclusive education promises to improve access to school for children with disabilities. She has highlighted aspects of the acceptability criterion, ranging from the absence of all internationally prohibited grounds of discrimination to school discipline, evidenced by corporal punishment or the "disabling" of pregnant schoolgirls in the continuation of their education. With regard to adaptability, the Special Rapporteur has emphasized the need to accommodate expectations whereby education would be vocationalized so as to equip learners with income-generating abilities and skills and thus contribute to poverty eradication.

A series of recommendations, addressed to the Government as well as to the creditor and/or donor community highlights the steps necessary to integrate fully human rights, gender and education.

Introduction    [ Go to Contents ]

1. On 9 April 1999, the Government of Uganda invited the Special Rapporteur on the right to education to visit the country. The Special Rapporteur visited Uganda in the exercise of her mandate from 26 June to 2 July 1999. She gratefully acknowledges the speed and efficiency with which the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights prepared her mission and facilitated her work in Uganda.

2. The objectives of the visit were (i) to assess progress in the realization of the right to education, with particular emphasis on the universal primary education (UPE) program initiated in 1997; (ii) to appraise the experience and prospects of reducing financial obstacles impeding access to school; (iii) to review the interpretation and application of human rights obligations throughout the education process; and (iv) to analyze possibilities for mainstreaming human rights and gender in education, with particular emphasis on primary education.

3. The program of her visit to Uganda was guided by the Special Rapporteur's approach to studying financial obstacles to access to education, which encompasses their international and domestic determinants, as well as identifying facilitating and inhibiting factors. The Special Rapporteur, accompanied by a human rights officer of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, met with officials of the Ministry of Education and Sports, the National Centre for Curriculum Development, the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Prison Commissioner and his staff, the Uganda Human Rights Commission, and also UNICEF, the World Bank, USAID and the (United Kingdom) Department for International Development (DFID). Alongside these meetings, the Special Rapporteur had a series of informal encounters with representatives of human rights organizations and academic institutions. This wide range of actors, together with a great deal of documentation, enabled the Special Rapporteur to obtain an insight into the variety of influences upon and expectations arising from UPE, in its third year at the time of the visit. Not only UPE but the entire field of education has been marked by rapid change. Wherever possible, relevant quantitative and qualitative information is sourced to the documents made available to the Special Rapporteur during her visit. Where information could not be verified, this is noted in the present report. The Special Rapporteur sees her visit to Uganda as the beginning of a process aimed at mainstreaming human rights and gender throughout education. She is encouraged by the interest shown throughout her visit in linking education and the right to education. She is grateful to all those who shared their knowledge, experience and ideas with her, and appeals to them all to continue the dialogue started during her visit by providing her with feedback on the present report and with information concerning any developments relevant to the right to education.

4. There are two dimensions to the domestic framework which determines the fate of the right to education. The first consists of formally adopted constitutional and legal guarantees, macroeconomic and sectoral strategies, and institutional infrastructure aimed at translating them into practice. They are influenced a great deal by the compounded pressures of poverty and debt repayment. Dependence on international and foreign funding for most human rights, gender and educational programmes is pervasive. This is well documented in primary and secondary written sources, which are widely available and have the advantage of the working language being invariably English. The second dimension is only revealed in a visit to a country. It encompasses the interplay amongst the historical heritage of the country, the current atmosphere there, the role of prominent personalities in shaping events, popular perceptions of these events and related expectations.

5. At the time of the mission, public debate was focused on the referendum to be held in the year 2000 concerning whether the movement-based political system should be maintained or a multi-party political system introduced. Security concerns ranged from the recent bombings and killings in the capital to the continuing warfare in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in northern Uganda. Corruption seemed by far the favourite topic in the mass media. These issues derive their specific meaning and importance from Uganda's history, which did not leave a legacy that would facilitate the recognition and realization of human rights, or leave an educational infrastructure that would make recognition of the right to education possible. This legacy is reviewed below, with a summarized account of important political developments and a parallel description of educational strategies pursued (or at least planned) in previous decades.

I.THE HISTORICAL INHERITANCE    [ Go to Contents ]

6. During colonial times Uganda was known as the pearl of Africa for its beauty, fertile land, lush vegetation and abundance of locally grown food. It became known again as the pearl of Africa in the early 1990s, when peace and security had been re-established in most parts of the country, a public administration had been built to provide essential services and a structural adjustment programme had been successfully implemented, keeping the rate of economic growth above 6 per cent, while servicing a huge debt. Decades of turmoil following Uganda's independence had much to do with the legacy inherited from the colonial time and prevented the forging of a State that would have overcome this legacy.

7. Uganda started her independence with a federal system (commonly referred to in Uganda as quasi-federal) which exacerbated the diversity of the country and further politicized ethnic, religious and linguistic differences. Education had a long history of missionary schools, with the corresponding content, methods and language of instruction, and did not contribute much to the articulation of a language policy or to a portrayal of Uganda's diversity in school textbooks.

8. Education introduced during the colonial times merged religious conversion and formal schooling with English as the language of instruction. By the time of independence , schooling thus orientated was established up to the university level. In the first post-independence decades, little was done to indigenize education or even to maintain public schooling. The result was a high illiteracy rate, especially in rural areas and among women.

9. The period 1962-1986 was authoritatively classified as the era of human rights violations by the Commission of Inquiry into the Violation of Human Rights (1986-1994). Its work covered the time between independence in 1962 and the takeover by the National Resistance Movement (NRM) Government in January 1986. The Commission faulted all previous Governments for institutionalized abuse of power. While the Commission was not the first body endowed with powers of investigating abuses committed by previous regimes, the implicit commitment in its establishment was that it would be the last such body and that institutionalized abuse of power would henceforth be prevented.

10. In 1995, constitutional and legal human rights guarantees started being adopted within Uganda's movement-based political system. This was followed by the establishment of the Uganda Human Rights Commission, while a host of other governmental institutions (the Inspector General of Government, the Auditor General, the Judicial Service Commission, the newly established Ministry of Ethics and Integrity, as well as the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament) have been set up to prevent abuse of power and are concentrating on exposing and opposing corruption. A large number of non-governmental organizations - international, foreign and domestic - work in Uganda in areas related to the right to education (such as social development, literacy, special education, gender, human rights) but few explicitly address that right, thus exacerbating the paucity of conceptual and analytical work necessary for its promotion and protection.

11. The Special Rapporteur acknowledges the extent of the obstacles in the path of full recognition and effective realization of the right to education in Uganda. Neither the colonial legacy nor the first decades of independence left the country equipped to address adequately education, human rights and gender equality, and least of all the right to education which cuts across all three of these areas.

A. The legacy of previous governments    [ Go to Contents ]

12. Uganda's colonial history is often traced back to the penetration of the Imperial British East African Company in 1890 and the takeover by the British Government four years later. In between, a series of civil wars was fought between different religious factions (1891-1892). There was no country-wide struggle for independence in Uganda; some of the political parties that still exist today were formed in the pre-independence years around ethnic and religious communities, especially in Buganda, which had had a long history as an independent and well-organized kingdom and enjoyed a privileged status during the colonial time.

13. Uganda gained its independence in 1962, with Milton Obote as Prime Minister and with a partially-federal constitutional arrangement. The position of Buganda and three other kingdoms exacerbated and politicized conflicts between established ethnic, religious and linguistic communities. The initial constitutional guarantees were gradually abrogated, culminating in what was dubbed "the pigeon-hole constitution", distributed in 1966 to parliamentarians' pigeon-holes just as they were to adopt it. The slide towards the rule of force was hastened by increasing reliance on the army and in 1971 Idi Amin became President of Uganda after a military coup. He stayed in power till 1979 and was ousted through Tanzanian military intervention. Amin's rule made Uganda internationally notorious for killings, disappearances and torture. What brought the international spotlight upon Uganda, however, was not the atrocities committed against Ugandans but the mass expulsion of Asians. Amin's justification for this expulsion was that the Ugandan economy was dominated by non-citizens and Asians were accused of sabotage and corruption. Uganda's Truth Commission noted two decades later that "the expulsion was on the whole popular amongst Ugandans ¹". This mass expulsion provoked vehement foreign and international protest.

14. The United Nations response to human rights violations by Idi Amin's government came too late because of the change of government. Uganda's armed attack on Tanzania led to a Tanzanian counter-attack in March 1979, which ended Idi Amin's regime. On 28 September 1979, the new President of Uganda addressed the United Nations General Assembly and noted that "the United Nations looked on with embarrassed silence [while] at least half a million people were murdered in cold blood ²". A swift transition from one governing regime to another followed in 1979-1980, leading to elections in December 1980 which were endorsed internationally but challenged domestically. They brought Milton Obote back to power, but warfare continued till 1986. The response of the United Nations was again faulted retroactively: although ongoing abuses had been documented, advisory services were provided to Uganda during this period, including the training of prison and police officials at a time when the Government had withdrawn authorization for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit detainees ³.

15. Human rights work started in earnest in the 1980s, typically focusing on summary killings, disappearances, torture, ill-treatment of detainees, political rights and civil liberties. Parallel work on development has grown much more (both in quantity and quality), but conceptual linkages between human rights and development have yet to be forged. This is particularly visible with regard to the eradication of poverty, which needs a human rights underpinning, as well as concerning economic, social and cultural rights for which operationalization wavers between an unrealistic expectation that the Government will provide necessary services to all free of charge, and surrender in the face of the combined obstacles of poverty and debt servicing. The Special Rapporteur fully acknowledges the enormity of the challenge, as well as the absence of an international rights-based strategy for Uganda that would facilitate the conceptualization of economic, social and cultural rights. Promising developments at the international level include the rights-based country programming of UNICEF and the explicit incorporation by DFID of the human right to education in its aid policy.

16. Much debate in Uganda focuses on the movement versus a multiparty political system. Those who fear that political parties would replicate regional, ethnic and religious divisions invoke the experience of the decades when chaos prevailed, precluding the emergence of a shared vision of the country's future. Proponents of multipartyism point out that the emergence of such a shared vision necessitates the free articulation of different collective and individual interests, for which political parties are the normal channel and for which the full range of political rights should be guaranteed. The implications of different models of political organizing for economic governance provide a conceptual bridge for linking political with economic governance. The Special Rapporteur sees a great deal of potential for overcoming the inherited abyss between civil/political and economic/social/cultural rights in treating political rights as an instrument for attaining economic, social and cultural rights. While the previous decades left a negative heritage, as is summarized below, the political and financial commitment to investment in education that led to UPE in 1997 promises to remedy the inherited dissociation between political and economic governance and open the way towards defining the right to education within Uganda's specific international and domestic environment.

B. Colonial and post-colonial education policies    [ Go to Contents ]

17. The history of education is much longer than Uganda's statehood. Written histories tend to ignore indigenous education and begin with the first formally established non-indigenous schools, pointing out that these enrolled a couple of hundred children in 1898, broadening their coverage to 22,000 in 1903 ⁴. Formal schooling was introduced by missionaries (the main religions were the Anglican and Catholic Churches and Islam) at the time when colonial Uganda was being formed into a future State. Although Islam preceded the introduction of Christianity in the late 1870s, Koranic schools were not immediately set up nor were they widespread. Anglican and Catholic mission schools also were unevenly spread between different regions. The mission schools introduced English as the language of instruction, whatever the pupils' mother tongue. The missionary tradition emphasized religion-based general education (religious conversion and instruction formed the core of the curriculum followed by secondary boarding schools) geared towards employment in the lowest ranks of the colonial administration. The colonial administration formally incorporated education in 1925 and the first annual report on education illustrates how it operated: "each teacher in charge of a bush school is supposed to visit the village around and seek to interest the people in the Christian message and call the children to school ⁵". Schooling was thus inextricably associated with Christianity.

18. Following independence in 1962, a series of attempts was made to secularize and indigenize education. The 1964 Education Act laid down the principle of non-denominational schools and the subsequent Act of 1970 asserted full control over schools. These precepts were not effectively implemented owing to the inability of consecutive governments to put their education strategies into practice ⁶. Education continued through a combination of religious schools and parental and/or community initiatives. Nevertheless, there was a trend towards centralized policy-making, funding and control until the process of decentralization started in the mid-1990s.

19. Secondary rather than primary education was prioritized in the 1960s, with boarding schools constituting more than two thirds of secondary schools. Primary education was shortened from eight to seven years. This trend was associated with the priority for turning out the highly-educated people necessary to govern and develop the country. The syllabus of the time did not include subjects such as agriculture (in a country where the bulk of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihood) and schooling continued in English (the mother tongue of an extremely small minority). The purpose of primary school remained preparation for secondary education, despite the fact that fewer than 1 in 10 of the children who made it to primary school actually continued on to secondary school.

20. A great deal of damage was done to the educational system as a whole, between 1971 and 1979 by the political repression that targeted teachers and students, and by economic mismanagement. That schooling continued was due to parental and community efforts. Indigenization of the syllabus and of the teaching profession followed the massive exodus of expatriate teachers in 1971-1972. English was retained as a compulsory core subject and the Swahili and Luganda languages were introduced. Rehabilitation of schools after the end of Idi Amin's rule relied a great deal on parents and communities; consecutive governments only funded teachers' salaries.

21. A 1986 stocktaking found that Uganda's problems in education were - 23 years after independence - the same as at the time of independence ⁷. The Education Policy Review Commission was established in 1987, chaired by Professor William Senteza Kajubi, to carry out a comprehensive analysis and suggest a blueprint for the future. The Commission found that a great deal of change was necessary to remould schooling as it was not only "too academic and theoretically oriented", preparing children for largely non-existent white-collar jobs, but also too centralized and lacking a language policy. The report of the Commission ⁸ was followed up by the 1992 white paper ⁹ upon which the present education strategy is based. The combination of a devastated economy, desperate poverty and the pressure of debt servicing postponed the putting of these ideas into practice till 1997.

II. THE CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT AND THE NEED FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IMPACT ASSESSMENT    [ Go to Contents ]

22. International human rights law assumes that international cooperation promotes human rights, especially economic, social and cultural rights and the rights of the child. This pre-empts asking whether it can actually impede their realization. A great deal of critique targeting policies designed to facilitate debt repayment by countries such as Uganda at the expense of investment in human rights opened the way for analysing two potentially conflicting roles of aid: it can impede or facilitate recognition and realization of human rights. In the case of Uganda, considerable change has taken place recently, transforming debt relief, structural adjustment and aid from being hostile to human rights to being human rights friendly, especially with regard to investment in education.

23. Aid to Uganda constitutes 8 per cent of the country's GDP, making up the shortfall between the Government's revenue of 11 per cent and expenditure of 19 per cent of GDP. Although the Government's debt strategy discourages new loans, not all aid is in the form of grants and what is nominally labelled as "aid" services debt created by previous loans (also labelled as "aid"). The need for a human rights impact assessment originates in the interplay between Uganda's debt servicing and human rights obligations and the dual role of many donors who are at the same time also creditors.

A. Conflicting role of creditors and donors    [ Go to Contents ]

24. The Government of Uganda has many times acknowledged its overdependence on external funding, which stems from the external debt burden combined with low revenue generation. The influence of the international creditor/donor community with regard to education cannot be overemphasized: Uganda's debt burden constrains options for allocation of available resources, pressurizes economic development towards exports and foreign investment, and makes education dependent on donor support. Because the bulk of debt is owed to the international donor community (the World Bank/International Development Association (IDA) is the most important creditor), a vicious circle develops of paying back past debts so as to be able to raise additional donor/creditor funding, thereby incurring further debt. The Special Rapporteur finds it necessary to raise a simple but important question: are loans for primary education facilitating or undermining the Government's obligation concerning the provision of primary education free of charge? The increasing role of bilateral donors in education has shifted the composition of aid from loans towards grants, but the available funds do not match the agreed priority of making primary education universally available: "targets imply very high levels of funds, for which we are dependent upon donor support. With existing financial commitments, funding gaps currently remain such that the full targets will not be met ¹⁰".

25. The price of debt servicing, translated into domestic budgetary allocations and export-promotion, was impoverishment ¹¹. The fate of the rural majority still does not figure in the macro-economic statistics that are used to assess Uganda's capacity for servicing its debt. Public investment to provide schooling for this rural majority enters such statistics on the debit side. The conflict between the huge investment necessary to provide primary education for all children (which will yield some long-term economic benefit) and the attractiveness of recouping owed funds by nudging the Government into investments that will yield high short-term economic benefits is obvious.

26. The rationale underpinning international human rights law is priority for investment in human rights. Because such investment does not yield immediate and high rates of return, it was envisaged as an essential governmental function. Governments that were willing but unable to make such an investment were to be assisted through international cooperation. This rationale was turned around when a Government's inability to invest in human rights was reinforced by international debt-servicing policy inhibiting such investment. Conditions (routinely called "conditionalities") attached to macro-development strategy negotiated between the Government and the main actors representing creditors and donors precluded an effective recognition of human rights, specifically the right to education. The Special Rapporteur has been encouraged by changes in creditors' and donors' policy in 1997-1999, which opened the way towards universalizing primary education and thus created the possibility of effective recognition of the right to education.

27. Human rights require micro-level analysis - routinely excluded from the macro-development framework - which posits as its target the rights of each individual and prioritizes the rights of each child. Uganda's principal development objective has been defined as "sustaining high and broad-based economic growth in which the poor are able to participate ¹²". An implicit assumption is that investment in human rights is justifiable to the extent that it contributes to economic growth. Indeed, funds earmarked for improving the quality of life of the poor are classified as expenditures and are dependent on donor support ¹³ . They appear as an "optional extra" rather than a key component of development. The linkage between literacy and economic growth is described thus by the World Bank:

"[T]he Government should seriously consider outreach programmes to attack illiteracy nationwide. This should be done without delay in order to equip Ugandans with basic literacy and numeracy skills to be better able to participate in and bring about the growth required for poverty reduction ¹⁴."

28. The Special Rapporteur does not question the necessity of prioritizing economic growth in order to enable the Government to raise revenue necessary for investment in human rights. Nevertheless, she feels the need to point out that defining education solely as an instrument for poverty reduction and/or economic growth does not conform to the definition of the right to education in international human rights law. Investment in education therefore does not necessarily facilitate effective recognition of the right to education and so the impact of such investment ought to be carefully assessed.

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