B. Uganda's conflicting international obligations      [ Go to Contents ]

29. Two conflicting types of international obligations - debt repayment and human rights obligations - have to be analysed in conjunction: the priority accorded to debt repayment can jeopardize investment in human rights. Both types of obligations are subsumed under international cooperation because a large proportion of debt is owed to multilateral agencies and individual donor Governments that alternate between the roles of creditor and donor. Where internally generated revenue is insufficient for both debt repayment and implementation of human rights obligations, as it is in Uganda, the priority accorded to debt repayment undermines investment in human rights. Moreover, during her visit to Uganda, the Special Rapporteur found a great imbalance between the high priority attached to debt servicing amongst international and domestic actors she talked to and the paucity of attention to Uganda's international human rights obligations, ranging from widespread uncertainty as to what Uganda's human rights obligations actually are and what they entail in the area of education, to poor compliance with reporting obligations under human rights treaties, or poor translation of international obligations into domestic human rights safeguards.

1. Debt repayment

30. The main actors in decision-making with regard to debt relief are creditor multilateral agencies (IMF, the World Bank/IDA) that do not consider themselves bound by international human rights law, and groupings of creditor countries (such as the Paris Club or G-7/G-8) that are not bound by international law at all. A great deal of effort has been devoted to arguing that such actors should be bound by international human rights law, but they are not. Assessing the human rights impact of their decisions is therefore a tool for bridging this gap.

31. The need for human rights impact assessment stems from the fact that the macro-development framework (economic, monetary and fiscal) is defined through extra-legal procedures and is exempt from legal challenge, yet it determines the capacity of the Government to allocate resources according to its human rights obligations. The discrepancy between economic governance and human rights obligations is transposed from global to domestic decision-making through the conditionalities attached to funding necessary for debt repayment, as well as determining eligibility for international and external funding necessary for investment in education.

32. Uganda first introduced its Economic Recovery Programme in May 1987 and has been implementing it for the past 12 years. It has been assessed as "ambitious and successful" by the criteria of high growth, low inflation, improved balance of payments and a strengthened private sector ¹⁵. Debt servicing was authoritatively assessed as impossible and in 1998 Uganda was the first highly-indebted poor country to receive debt relief. The decision was made in April 1997, but Uganda had to wait another year for implementation. The total nominal debt service relief agreed was $650 million. Uganda's debt is owed mostly to multilateral agencies and so $73 million was set for bilateral and $273 million for multilateral creditors (of which $160 million for the World Bank and $69 million for IMF ¹⁶).

33. This debt relief has not been assessed as generous. The stringent conditions for eligibility were aggravated by the debt servicing to export ratio. The linkage of debt relief to exports shifts attention away from the impact of debt servicing on budgetary allocations. In 1998/1999, $175 million destined for debt servicing was reduced to $132 million, with $43 million in debt relief. Funds released through debt relief were transferred to poverty eradication, including primary education, trebling the central Government's transfers, earmarked for primary education, to the districts. The additional funding boosts that would become possible with further debt relief can easily be envisaged and it is regrettable that investment in essential services, such as education, needed to create a basis for the recognition of education as a human right, does not figure prominently in decision-making on debt relief.

34. The Special Rapporteur deems it important to emphasize that in the case of Uganda consecutive decisions on debt relief diminished its negative impact on human rights. She has been gladdened by the public attention in Western Europe which accompanied further promises of debt relief in June 1999 and will continue to follow developments concerning Uganda. Her numerous conversations in Uganda revealed, however, that - unlike debt repayment and/or structural adjustment - human rights obligations are not perceived as binding nor is meeting them facilitated by benchmarks and performance indicators.

2. Human rights obligations

35. The conflict between Uganda's debt repayment and human rights obligations is clear with regard to resource allocation. The two types of obligation pull in opposite directions - debt repayment towards diminishing governmental allocations for education and human rights obligations towards increasing such allocations. Although the growing influence of bilateral donors and conditionalities attached to their aid for education have increased the Government's budgetary allocation for primary education, this influence has not encompassed facilitating a translation of Uganda's human rights obligations - including those concerning primary education - into recognized and enforceable rights.

36. Uganda has ratified all the human rights treaties which include specific guarantees of the right to education ¹⁷. None of these can be directly invoked by their potential beneficiaries and only for two treaties have reports been submitted by the Government. These two reports - on women's rights and the rights of the child - marked the beginning of a dialogue about the translation of international obligations into domestic human rights guarantees. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women reviewed Uganda's first report in 1995 and "noted with concern the effects of structural adjustment programmes on women and children". The Committee noted as additional issues of concern the high percentage of households headed by girls and the sexual abuse of schoolchildren by their teachers and other adults ¹⁸. For its part, the Committee of the Rights of the Child expressed its concern about children not being registered at birth in many rural areas and at insufficient access to education; it emphasized "the low level of school enrolment and high drop-out rates for girls due to, inter alia, early marriage, the lack of learning and teaching facilities and materials, and the shortage of trained teachers ¹⁹".

37. The Special Rapporteur was happy to learn that Uganda's second periodic report under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women is being finalized for submission. She was extremely concerned to find that there were no plans for the submission of the many overdue reports under other human rights treaties. The issue of the lack of reporting by Uganda has been raised by all the relevant human rights treaty bodies over the past two decades. There has been no change in the Government's performance thus far. The Uganda Human Rights Commission, mandated to monitor the Government's compliance with its international obligations, suggested that the government organ responsible for reporting "be clearly identified and officially demanded to fulfil its mandate ²⁰". The Special Rapporteur endorses this suggestion and hopes that international human rights obligations will gradually come to be perceived as legally binding in practice and not merely in theory.

38. A great deal of human rights assistance that is being provided to Uganda does not follow the same strategy as in the field of primary education and appears to be dispersed amongst many different actors and projects. Since human rights is a cross-cutting issue, there is no obvious lead ministry nor is a single donor agency coordinating aid in this area. The Special Rapporteur is concerned about the manner in which human rights assistance is being provided. This was illustrated by the number of times she had to explain that she was not representing any donor nor starting any new project, which is obviously a broadly shared perception amongst both governmental and non-governmental actors as soon as "human rights" is mentioned in conjunction with "education".

III. DOMESTIC FRAMEWORK      [ Go to Contents ]

39. The Special Rapporteur found that a great deal of uncertainty characterizes economic, social and cultural rights. On the one hand, they are identified with the Government's delivery of services and thus with meeting human needs, rather than with recognizing and protecting individual rights and freedoms. On the other hand, their recognition is deemed necessarily delayed till economic growth makes self-provisioning feasible.

40. The specific nature of social and economic rights requires their promotion through economic and fiscal policies, as well as through their legal recognition. Primary education has been granted an increased budgetary allocation in the period 1997-1999 and, in addition, has received considerable donor funding. The right to education is recognized in the Constitution but not in legislation and the UPE programme has no legislative underpinning. The Special Rapporteur's many questions concerning the sustainability of primary education subsequent to the end of donor funding and its fate in the budgetary allocation after the creditors' and/or donors' conditionality ends remained unanswered. The general hope that economic growth (to which education should contribute) would yield sufficient revenue for the Government to enable it to replace donor support may not be realized in the short term. The first UPE generation will finish school in the year 2003 and these 13-year-olds neither can nor should be expected to make a dent in poverty or to foster economic growth. The experience of many countries shows that increased demand for secondary education will be a certain outcome of the success of UPE thus generating further pressure for budgetary and donor allocations to education.

41. The Special Rapporteur feels that the recognition of the right to education constitutes the first necessary step towards defining the rights of the child and the corresponding obligations of the Government and parents necessary to sustain the successful increase in access to primary education through UPE. The African tradition of specifying individual duties and responsibilities (especially those relating to taxation, necessary to enable the Government to raise revenue) facilitates the designing of a legislative framework for the right to education.

A. Constitutional guarantees      [ Go to Contents ]

42. Uganda underwent a pioneering exercise in constitution-making in the period 1988-1995. It started with the Constitutional Commission, which solicited views on what constitutional arrangements and guarantees there should be through a lengthy but inconclusive process. More than 700 seminars were held throughout the country and more than 20,000 written contributions were received. This consultative process led to a draft constitution in 1992, and was followed by elections to the Constituent Assembly and the finalization and adoption of the Constitution in 1995. The emphasis on the rights of women, children and people with disabilities in the Constitution was interpreted as an outcome of such a broad-based process of constitution-making.

43. The 1995 Constitution posited education as a right, specifying that each child is entitled to basic education, which is a shared responsibility of the State and the child's parents. The 1996 Children's Statute went further in defining the parental responsibility to maintain children, adding that this parental duty gave the child the right to education. These provisions have not been operationalized through subsequent legislation nor have they been reflected in the educational strategy, however.

44. Constitutional provisions relating to gender were far-reaching and have been subsequently reinforced through extra-legal measures. Uganda's Constitution affirmed women's right to affirmative action, which has been translated into practice in their political representation or access to university. The National Resistance Movement (NRM) started affirmative action in 1987 by ensuring that at least one woman was a member of the then Resistance Councils, from the local level upwards, and the practice of reserved seats for women has continued. This practice has given women a political voice and made possible its gradual translation into women's equal rights to resources, especially land. The Special Rapporteur deems this issue to be crucial for motivating parents to educate their daughters because, for the bulk of Uganda's population, land is the key to survival and land ownership is the key to participation in decision-making from the family onwards.

45. Following the results of the 1991 census, analyses of people working in agriculture revealed that 70 per cent of men (and 27 per cent of women) were recorded as self-employed, while 73 per cent of women (and 30 per cent of men) were recorded as unpaid family workers ²¹. Women's ability to be recorded as self-employed depends on their ownership of land, where women still constitute a statistical minority under statutory law and are right-less under customary law. These bleak prospects for women's self-employment undermine incentives for their schooling. At the time of the Special Rapporteur's visit to Uganda, a great deal of attention was focused on the land reform legislation and on the uncertainty of prospects for women's land ownership which this process revealed. Co-ownership by spouses was proposed in the form of an amendment, which according to some interviewees had not been duly tabled and was thus absent from the adopted law. The Special Rapporteur was delighted to note the attention paid to the effects of land law on women, which vividly demonstrated how the exercise of political rights leads to demands for economic rights.

B. Education strategy      [ Go to Contents ]

46. One striking feature of Uganda's educational policy is the non-use of human rights language, which illustrates the abyss between human rights and education. The Education Strategic Investment Plan 1998-2003 commits the Government to assuring universal access to primary education as the highest priority, points to the removal of financial impediments and pays particular attention to gender and regional equality. Putting the Plan into practice is envisaged through shared contributions by the public and private sector, by the household and the community. It confirms that "communities will retain responsibility for the expansion of primary classrooms ²²". With the expansion of enrolments within UPE, the ability of poor rural communities to provide classrooms and to recruit and retain schoolteachers has placed an additional strain upon the fragile fabric of self-provisioning.

C. Budgetary allocations      [ Go to Contents ]

47. The Education Policy Review Commission recommended that 20 per cent of the Government's budget be earmarked for education. This target was surpassed by the allocation of 33 per cent of the discretionary recurrent budget, out of which 62 per cent was devoted to primary education ²³. Almost half of these funds went on teachers' salaries, with the building of classrooms and the purchase of textbooks being the other major items of expenditure. The UPE development budget was originally planned to increase from $60 million in 1997 to $125 million in 2002, the bulk of which (90 per cent) was expected to be funded by donors. These estimates proved to be much too modest and projections of the funding needed to universalize primary education skyrocketed. Donor commitments increased (the United Kingdom committed Ł67 million and the World Bank $115 million), the Government's budgetary allocations even more.

48. Discussions about nominal budgetary allocations were inevitably accompanied by a switch of topic to corruption in the conversations which the Special Rapporteur had with diverse actors. A great deal of attention has been devoted to exposing and opposing corruption because it prevents apparent macro-level benefits from filtering down to the intended beneficiaries. Emanual Ablo and Ritva Reinikka carried out a much quoted study into the fate of budgetary allocations on their way from the central Government's budget to individual schools, teachers and children. Their findings challenged the officially recorded numbers of schoolchildren, showing that enrolment in the period 1991-1995 increased by 60 per cent rather than being stagnant as the official statistics would have it, while less than 30 per cent of public spending nominally allocated for education reached schools ²⁴.

D. Decentralization      [ Go to Contents ]

49. Uganda has implemented a threefold process of decentralization: (i) political decentralization was initiated through the establishment of Resistance Councils during the war and broadened throughout the country as of 1986; (ii) administrative decentralization was introduced in 1993 with the aim of setting up local administration accountable downwards to the local population rather than upwards to the central Government; (iii) financial decentralization followed through unconditional and conditional block grants from central to local government and the introduction of locally decided budgets.

50. The process of decentralization increased the role of district authorities in the educational system, especially in primary schooling. Districts are expected to assume full responsibility "for the delivery of all primary and secondary educational services ²⁵" and are recruiting teachers, while the Ministry of Education pays their salaries. Decentralization is envisaged to develop into devolution with regard to primary schooling. The head teacher, the management committee and parent-teacher associations (PTAs) are expected to run schools. During the time when a great deal of funding was secured through PTAs, their involvement in the running of schools was considerable and their role changed with increased funding from the central Government. A switch from parental involvement to defining schooling as community service (thus potentially involving both parents and non-parents) has not yet yielded discernable outcomes because it is a recent initiative. The Special Rapporteur will continue following with great interest the effects of decentralization on primary schooling.

IV. HUMAN RIGHTS OBLIGATIONS CORRESPONDING TO THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION
[ Go to Contents ]

51. In her preliminary report (E/CN.4/1999/49) the Special Rapporteur developed a 4-A scheme (availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability) to analyse governmental obligations corollary to the right to education. It is applied here to Uganda.

A. Availability: schools and teachers      [ Go to Contents ]

52. Primary education has immense importance because it is the only type of education to which most Ugandans can ever have access: secondary and university education are beyond the reach of the majority.

53. The challenge of making schooling available for all Ugandan children can be succinctly portrayed by outlining its major determinants: half of Uganda's population is younger than 15 and for each child there is only one adult statistically classified as pertaining to the labour force (15-64), thus making the dependency ratio 1:1. The estimated number of primary-school children is 6.5 million; the labour force is estimated at 8 million. The corollary financial obstacles are compounded by the legacy of widespread illiteracy, a ruined educational system and unpayable foreign debt bestowed upon the current generation by the previous decades. They are further compounded by the fact that Uganda is one of the least urbanized countries in Africa and providing schooling for a dispersed rural population is no easy task. Moreover, the fertility rate remains very high (Uganda's population is estimated to have grown from 16 million at the time of the 1991 census to 21 million in 1999), further increasing the youthfulness of the population, the consequent demand for schooling and the low generation of the revenue necessary to finance it.

54. Under the UPE programme, the officially reported enrolment in primary school trebled ²⁶, making additional classrooms and teachers an urgent priority.

55. The huge increase in the number of learners has not yet been accompanied by the provision of an adequate number of schools and classrooms. The Uganda Bureau of Statistics reported 10,940 schools existing in 1997, 60 per cent of which were classified as "non-permanent", 40 per cent without safe water and 48 per cent without sanitation. The 1998 minimum conditions are used as guidelines for the building of new schools, not as yardsticks to eliminate the use of classrooms and/or schools that do not comply with these minimum criteria. The Special Rapporteur was told that schooling can still take place underneath a tree, while many children have not even seen separate toilets for girls and boys. Building and refurbishing schools to meet the requirements of the large number of learners with the limited funds available remains a huge challenge.

56. Primary schoolteachers have the status of civil servants (the official term is "public service" rather than "civil service" in Uganda) but have been exempt from the reductions affecting the public service. The number of primary-schoolteachers was officially recorded as 82,745 in 1995 ²⁷ and increased significantly following the trebling of enrolment under the UPE programme. The Special Rapporteur could not verify the number of teachers in 1999 because the process of registering teachers on the payroll has not been completed, but the ceiling for their recruitment is apparently set at 94,300 under the public service hiring freeze. Teachers' monthly salaries were increased fivefold, from $8 to $72, between 1992 and 1997 and to $80 in 1998. Teachers' salaries were apparently the same whether they worked in the capital or in remote areas and were based on the public service classification rather than the teacher's individual performance. The size of the effort that teachers are required to make is well illustrated by the ratio of 6 million learners to less than 100,000 teachers. The teacher-pupil ratio is set at 1:110, but in the final, seventh year of primary school the ratio tends to be 1:20, while for the first year it can reportedly reach 1:300. Various forms of multi-shift and multi-grade teaching are being experimented with to facilitate coping with such a huge number of learners.

57. The Special Rapporteur was often told that half of teachers are untrained. The National Commission for UNESCO was blunt in a self-assessment: "About 65 per cent of the teachers in [primary] schools are untrained and/or undertrained ²⁸". The surge of children in the period 1997-1999 is likely to have worsened the situation and it is not yet known how much improvement has been achieved through the many ongoing teacher training projects.

58. As part of the public service, teachers were granted trade union freedoms as of 1993. Many strikes (formal and informal) took place, mainly because of delayed payment of teachers' salaries. School principals are prohibited from exercising the right to strike because they are defined as performing an essential service. The Special Rapporteur's efforts to discern how teachers' collective interests are represented and how the teachers' voice is heard in the many ongoing discussions about UPE yielded a complicated story going back to the initial attempts at forming trade unions in the 1960s and the opposition to them embodied in equating trade unions with strikes. The Teachers' Association survived as an actor recognized and supported by changing governments, and underwent various challenges to its leadership. As far as the Special Rapporteur could ascertain, the teachers' collective voice is lacking in policy-making, whether this relates to changes in the primary school syllabus (one proposal was to increase the number of subjects from 4 to 11) or the policy of inclusive education (integration of children with disabilities and the training of all teachers in coping with diverse-ability classes) or corporal punishment.

B. Accessibility: excluded and unreached children      [ Go to Contents ]

59. Precise information on the children who should be but are not in school is lacking, one of the crucial obstacles being the absence of registration of children at birth. In its report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Government acknowledges that "this practice and requirement has been lax ²⁹". There is an annual headcount of children in school but estimates of the numbers of those outside vary a great deal. Moreover, the absence of birth registration makes for reliance on guesswork in determining children's ages.

60. School fees were abolished in January 1997 and enrolment increased from about 2.5 million in 1996, to about 5.5 million in 1998 and to about 6.5 million in April 1999. Different sources of educational statistics posit different figures, but these estimates highlight sufficiently the growth of enrolment, without it being necessary to assess figures that may or may not be accurate. The Special Rapporteur's rationale is simple: before 1997, schools had to remit fees according to the number of enrolled children and the incentives to under-report their number were many, for example allowing children to attend school without paying fees. Subsequent to the abolition of this requirement, there is an incentive to over-report enrolments because schools receive capitation grants according to this reported enrolment. Ongoing efforts to obtain comprehensive, accurate and verifiable educational statistics are expected to yield results in the near future.

61. The cost of education had been the main obstacle to children's attending school. Families were bearing two thirds of the cost of primary education, and schooling the average seven children born to each woman was beyond the reach of most.

62. Making primary education all-encompassing and compulsory is planned for the year 2003. The priorities are enrolment of unreached children, retention of those who are enrolled and preparation for the expected surge in demand for secondary education following the trebling of the number of primary-school children ³⁰.

1. Affirmative action for girls and young women

63. The ratio of girls to boys in primary school increased by an annual 1 per cent between 1995 and 1998 (from 45 per cent to 47 per cent) but this average hides a great deal of variation within the country and among primary schools. Equalization of the number of girls and boys at the entry point seems close to being achieved and attention is shifting to the retention of girls, especially after the fourth grade (P-4 in Uganda) when many girls tend to drop out. The Special Rapporteur was told that in a typical class of 20 in the final, seventh year of rural primary school, there can be 17 boys and only 3 girls. Moreover, illiteracy is widespread among adult women, also in rural areas, but attracts little political or funding priority.

64. Women's status in the family is coloured by the fact that 30 per cent of marriages are polygamous ³¹. No official statistics are being collected to document the extent of polygamy, while the Second Wives and Concubines Association of Uganda was the first effort to make this phenomenon visible. The erroneous image of the marriage as necessarily monogamous has two direct consequences for children's education. Firstly, the number of children per household is determined by the number of wives and easily multiplies the four who are exempt from primary school fees. Secondly, the payment of school fees is traditionally the father's duty; this determines the criteria for selecting those children who will go to school.

65. Gross enrolment in the period 1993-1995 was 79 per cent for boys and 67 per cent for girls; net enrolment was estimated at 58 per cent for boys and 51 per cent for girls, and school attendance at 65 per cent for boys and 63 per cent for girls ³². Fees were abolished for four children per family, with the additional requirement that two be girls. In response to the Special Rapporteur's concern about access to school for children who were not among the chosen four, she was provided with a great deal of anecdotal evidence of the imaginative ways in which this obstacle was being overcome. She was told that four-children-per-family was interpreted as four-children-per-woman thus allowing the enrolment of children born to second and subsequent wives. The fact that many polygamous marriages are not registered made it easy for mothers to be portrayed as single parents. Unverifiable estimates placed the number of fee-paying children at between 10 and 15 per cent. The coverage of additional children by UPE seems to be tolerated, while the four-per-family rule is not altered, so that it will represent a subliminal message about the desirability of smaller families.

66. The Government has also adopted a policy of preferential treatment in tertiary education, which promises to result in a larger pool of women for the professions and for positions requiring university education. An increase of girls attending university was achieved by weighting of their secondary school leaving examination scores by 1.5. What became known as the "1.5 bonus" was introduced in 1990 and increased female university enrolment from 22 per cent in 1989-1990 to 35 per cent in 1990-1991. One criticism has been that this has benefited girls from the most prestigious schools in and around Kampala. ³³

2. Inclusion of children with disabilities

67. The Special Rapporteur was happy to learn that a shift of approach to education for children with disabilities had taken place and the previous emphasis on special schools and/or education was being replaced by a commitment to inclusive schooling.

68. Statistics concerning schooling for children with disabilities used to be mutually contradictory. According to one source, in the early 1990s only "348 blind, 227 deaf and 299 mentally handicapped children" were in school ³⁴. According to another, there were "55 special schools, 24 annexes for the handicapped and 2 schools for the deaf" ³⁵. Such special schools will continue for children with severe disabilities, while the inclusive approach aims to integrate as many others as possible in ordinary schools.

69. The 1996 Children's Statute provides for equal opportunities to education for children with disabilities. (The rule of thumb applied by the Ministry of Education is to assume that 10 per cent of children have some form of disability.) This was a follow-up to the 1995 Constitution and to the success of representatives of people with disabilities (unified under the umbrella organization, the National Union of Disabled Persons in Uganda (NUDIPU)) in raising their visibility and placing their problems on the human rights agenda. Special programmes for children with disabilities were initiated, without a corollary effort to introduce into educational curricula for non-disabled children contents that would tackle and strive to eliminate the inherited stigmatization of disability. The planned inclusive schooling and teacher training aimed at their adaptation to diverse-ability learners will hopefully contribute to reducing such stigmatization.

3. Children affected by armed conflicts

70. Children have been victims of armed conflicts throughout Uganda's turbulent history, but the armed conflict in northern Uganda, which has been festering for years, seems to have been particularly child-targeting. Abuses have been reported on both sides, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan army. In 1996 the Working Group on Disappearances forwarded to the Government 41 cases of abductions of schoolchildren by the LRA ³⁶ and in 1998 the Commission on Human Rights adopted its second resolution on the abduction of children from northern Uganda. The Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the impact of armed conflict on children serves as focal point for the coordination of efforts to obtain the release of children abducted by armed groups in northern Uganda ³⁷. One outcome of this situation has been extremely low school enrolment, reported to be 18 per cent in 1997 and lower than 19.6 per cent in 1996 ³⁸.

71. Schools and schoolchildren have also been the target of attacks in the south-western part of Uganda (Rwenzori mountains), where the abduction and killing of schoolchildren have been widespread. Preventing such abuses has thus far proved impossible and a great deal of public attention has focused on them. The Government's implicit rationale has been that its response to such horrors, no matter how harsh, should be judged as a lesser evil.

4. Children deprived of their liberty

72. Children who are deprived of their liberty are unable to have access to schooling unless it is provided in their places of detention. This has proved impossible because of low budgets for the administration of prisons and juvenile detention facilities which are inadequate for large and constantly increasing populations of detainees. It is precisely for people who are in the custody of the State - particularly children - that specific human rights guarantees have been elaborated in great detail to overcome the impossibility of securing budgetary allocations for them through the political process.

73. Education for children in approved schools and reformatories has not been positively assessed by the Government itself: "dilapidated structures as a result of the many years of turmoil and neglect; lack of equipment and qualified personnel to effect [the] training programme; inadequate recreation and play facilities; and poor feeding and sleeping conditions ³⁹". Education was conspicuously absent from this assessment. As far as the Special Rapporteur could ascertain, no schooling is provided and children can be confined to their overcrowded dormitories or spend the entire day working. Work consists of manual labour which is poorly rewarded (the lowest reported payment is U Sh 1 per day, equivalent to $0.001).

5. Working children

74. As in other poor countries, most people - including children - work because they simply cannot afford not to. Most children work in the informal sector and their numbers, ages or conditions of work are not known. It is well known, however, that the phenomenon is widespread. Working children's access to school has not been guaranteed by the mere abolition of school fees; schooling remains expensive because of other direct costs (such as uniforms) and the opportunity cost resulting from competing claims of schooling and working. Many children work simply to be able to eat and getting them to school will necessitate not only eliminating all direct costs but also providing them with food.

75. The Special Rapporteur learned with pleasure that in November 1998 the Government signed the Memorandum of Understanding with the ILO Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), which was accompanied by a $1.5 million grant, and she will follow its implementation closely. She feels that this initiative fits in well with the Government's plans to vocationalize primary education.

C. Acceptability: content and methods of schooling      [ Go to Contents ]

76. The Special Rapporteur noted that most debates about education in Uganda revolve around necessary - but unavailable - funding. This focus is justifiable in education but many issues concerning human rights in education are not resource dependent. The content of educational curricula and textbooks does not have any effect on the cost, and resorting to corporal punishment to enforce school discipline does not have any correlation with wealth or poverty. Mother-tongue education does generate additional costs in terms of instructional materials but saves the cost of repetition because it facilitates learning.

1. Educational curriculum and textbooks

77. The primary school curriculum consists of four core subjects: English, Mathematics, Science (which includes health) and Social Studies (which combines History, Geography, Religion and Civics). These four subjects are examined in the Primary Leaving Examination (PLE) in English. The annual grading of pupils is done under the auspices of the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB).

78. Schools have been given freedom of choice among textbooks approved by the National Textbook Vetting Committee. USAID has supported a reform of textbook procurement, leading to contracts with an initial 8 and subsequently 10 publishers, amongst whose offers individual schools have a choice. The Government is subsidizing the cost of textbooks by transferring funds to individual schools that translate to a ratio of seven (or six) pupils per book. How a child can learn to read and write (in English, which is not the mother tongue of most pupils) sharing a single textbook with five or six other pupils is a question to which the Special Rapporteur did not obtain an answer.

79. To find out what the cost of textbooks is for those parents who wish to supply their child with his or her own set of books, the Special Rapporteur purchased two sets (one by an international and the other by a Ugandan publisher) and discovered that textbooks are prohibitively expensive. The minimum cost of a set of textbooks for the four core subjects is $20 (compared to, for example, a teacher's monthly salary of $80) and with the cost of additional books, notebooks, pens and pencils, and the school uniform easily amounts to one monthly salary per child.

80. Besides their cost, the content of textbooks raises many questions. The Ministry of Gender and Community Development (as it was then) noted in 1995 that schools socialized "girls into their subordinate roles in society. In this, the schools provide a faithful reflection of women's subordination within the home ⁴⁰". School textbooks have reportedly been reviewed to cleanse them of a prejudicial portrayal of girls and women. The Special Rapporteur found, nevertheless many examples of such portrayal, which can be illustrated by this passage from the Social Studies textbook for P-5 (10-year-olds): "Both the Baganda and the Banyoro think that marriage is very important. Women who are not married are not well respected among them. Each man traditionally had more than one wife. He could have as many wives as he wanted. A man with many wives was respected by other members of the tribe ⁴¹". Following this passage, children are informed that girls must kneel (boys can stand) when greeting elders. In a final comment, they are told that such traditional customs are disappearing because of "modern Western customs".

81. The Special Rapporteur is also concerned about the portrayal of Uganda's racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity in textbooks. The revival of traditional kingdoms (Buganda, Toro and Bunyoro) in 1993 opened the way for the recognition of cultural diversity, which had been artificially abolished in 1967. These are well portrayed in children's textbooks. There is no recognized minority or indigenous status for any community (those often mentioned are Karamojong, Banyarwanda, and Batwa). Nomadic communities (especially the Karamojong in the north-east) are routinely the subject of criticism in the mass media for their backwardness and often blamed for constituting an obstacle to development. They are largely absent from textbooks. The expulsion of Asian Ugandans in 1972 reduced the Asian community in the country from 76,000 in 1970 to 430 in 1980 ⁴². It was made legally possible in 1982 for them to reclaim their property and this was put into practice in 1992-1993, under considerable donor pressure. There is no indication that they were welcomed back, nor is there any evidence that this multiracial country is addressing the multilayered problems of its diversity.

2. Languages of instruction

82. The heritage of missionary schooling in English, strengthened by governmental policies in the first decade of independence, was addressed through the proposed introduction of trilingualism - the mother tongue, English and Kiswahili. The mother tongue should be used as the medium of instruction in the first years of primary school, but there do not seem to be any textbooks available. A survey in 1995 found that 60 per cent of children spoke a different language at home from the language of instruction in school ⁴¹. Kiswahili and English should be taught as subjects during the first four years, but few textbooks are available in Kiswahili. The language of instruction shifts to English in the fifth grade, with the mother tongue and Kiswahili taught as subjects.