After 22 months closed, Uganda's schools are struggling

Even before President Yoweri Museveni shut down schools in March 2020 to curb the spread of COVID-19, Uganda’s students were already struggling with basic reading comprehension and dropping out at alarming rates.

The country’s 22-month school closure, which ended in January — the longest pandemic-related shutdown in the world — only deepened those struggles, particularly for lower-income students. While some families hired private tutors or took advantage of online or televised lessons, children from working-class backgrounds often spent the lockdown helping replace their parents’ lost income.

A month after schools officially reopened, teachers, administrators, and officials are still coming to terms with the fallout.

Amid the pileup of students joining primary school classes, pupils span a range of ages and abilities, threatening to overwhelm those teachers who returned to the job. Secondary schools have the opposite problem, as students forced into work are now reluctant to abandon that income. Specific worries center on teenage girls, who may have gotten pregnant or been forced into early marriages by families desperate for brice price payments.

An ad hoc mixture of programs that sprang up in response to the closures is struggling to fill gaps that emerged in the pandemic and to overcome those that existed before.

Namata Christine Kuteesa is among those not returning to school — except she is a teacher, not a student. For five years before the pandemic, she taught primary students at a school outside the capital, Kampala.

“When you teach, there is a lot of work,” she said. “Lesson plan, assessment, marking — there is no sleep. All the time, you are busy.”

And with very little compensation. She was taking home about $70 a month. That money disappeared when her school was forced to close in March 2020, with no guarantees from the government of when it would be allowed to reopen.

In the meantime, she found work driving a motorcycle taxi, known as a boda boda. The field is usually dominated by men, and she said she is regularly sexually harassed by clients and police officers alike — but still she prefers it to teaching.

“There is money in boda boda,” she said. “In teaching, there is little money.”

Schools are struggling to replace teachers like Kuteesa in a country where, even before the lockdown, primary school class sizes could easily stretch beyond 100 students.

Around the government’s October 2021 announcement that schools would reopen, the education arm of the grassroots, student-focused organization Somero Uganda — recognizing the potential impact of large numbers of educators abandoning the profession — began gathering small groups of teachers to encourage them to return to the classroom and to offer them psychosocial support.

“It was for us to bring back their hearts, their minds to this school environment,” said Deputy Executive Director Irene Nakakande. “We know they’ve gone through a lot.”

More than 200 teachers have completed the training and returned to the classroom.

Still, with a backlog of students demanding primary school spots but fewer experienced teachers willing to take over the classes, “almost a generation will be wiped out if we just continue with business as usual,” said Mary Goretti Nakabugo, the executive director at Uwezo Uganda, an organization measuring learning outcomes.

The government’s response was to automatically advance all students to the next grade, regardless of previous performance. The Education Ministry also introduced a compressed curriculum.

Those changes will not overcome all of the problems caused by the lockdown, particularly at lower levels, Nakabugo said. Elementary education is compulsory in Uganda, though Save the Children International estimates 1 in 5 children don’t make it through all seven years. And finishing primary school is no guarantee of an education. The majority of primary school students from grades three to seven struggled to read or do division at a grade two level, according to 2018 data released by Uwezo.

Now, children forced to delay the start of primary school are crowded into classes with kids two or three years younger, despite marked differences in emotional capacity and maturity. And in a system with teachers who are used to accommodating students at different learning levels, that range of capabilities has widened.

“Where parents or schools made some kind of initiatives to ensure children continued learning at home, the gap has actually increased from those who didn’t,” Nakabugo said. The National Planning Authority, a government organization, estimates that more than half of students stopped learning during the shutdown, despite government attempts to broadcast programs over the television or radio and to distribute lessons.

Nakabugo said families had other priorities, particularly at the height of a broader lockdown in which adults were unable to easily leave their homes. Many parents sent children to look for work, wagering that they were less likely to get stopped by authorities.

That was the case for 18-year-old Lutaaya Mustaphah. After his father lost his income because the school where he taught closed, the secondary school student took a job in a garage to learn to repair cars. Though he returned to school in January, Mustaphah has trouble remembering lessons from two years ago, particularly in chemistry and physics.

“We all need a reboot,” he said. “Most of us forgot almost everything. Now we’re just refreshing our minds.”

Nakabugo said that teachers, particularly in primary grades, should go back to the basics.

“You have to assume they have never been in school,” she said. “If we are driven by the curriculum, they’re all going to be left behind. And in the end, we all lose as a nation.”

Save the Children introduced “catch-up clubs" during the lockdown to provide remedial literacy lessons. There are now more than 60 clubs, run by community members but attached to nearby schools. With classes having resumed, the clubs remain but with more flexible schedules, offering some students a safety net.

Then there are the children who did not return. Agnes Ajombo’s mother, Christine Nakalema, said her 16-year-old daughter loved school and was hoping to move on from Buikwe High School in a small town in central Uganda to train as a doctor. But school closures and movement restrictions meant Nakalema had no choice but to ask her daughter to pick up some work as a hairdresser to help support the family. Last month, just after the school reopening was announced, the teenager found that she was pregnant.

“She feels she can’t fit in the classroom setting,” Nakalema said. She is not the only one. The National Planning Authority suggested that a third of students might never return because they found jobs, got pregnant, or were forced into marriages during the pandemic, among other reasons.

As soon as the school closures were announced, Komo Learning Centres recognized the challenges it would introduce. Komo offers education, health, and mental health interventions, including running so-called do-it-yourself clubs in 30 schools. During the pandemic, Komo encouraged members to transform the clubs into small income-generating projects, such as by producing soap or making products out of recycled bottles.

By suggesting that teams of students pursue small projects, Komo offered a path to financial support, relieving some of the pressure on families while also keeping students in a peer group that remained committed to getting an education when schools reopened.

“The numbers back in school now are big,” said Frank Kibuule, one of Komo’s education project officers. “So whatever we told them paid off.”

The shutdown exacerbated problems within Ugandan schools. But the variety of initiatives that emerged to address problems extending from — and even existing before — the closures may point the way to building a stronger educational system, experts said.

“We need many more such interventions,” Nakabugo said. “If we leave everything to the schools, the job is just too big for one stakeholder. These interventions that started during the school closures should really continue.”

The question is how to expand them, because even as organizations leveraged the resources they had during the shutdown, the majority of Ugandan students still saw their education stall.

Edison Nsubuga, who runs Save the Children’s education programs in the country, is looking to the Ugandan government.

“These good practices can be taken to scale through the Ministry of Education system,” he said. “They could coordinate to help reach almost the whole country.”