Private school proprietors in Uganda have expressed worry that a big number of children in the country is likely to drop out of school due to prolonged lock down on educational institutions.
According to Joseph Kiggundu the chairman of the National COVID-19 committee of Private Educational Institutions, many children have been married off, others have become young mothers and others are now laborers.
Addressing a press conference in Kampala today, Kiggundu said such children are not likely to return to school when they finally reopen.
“At the beginning of the lock down children were agitating to return to schools but six months down the road many children are getting used to staying at home so some of the children will simply refuse to return to school” said Kiggundu.
He said the lockdown has also had a toll on teachers as many can not meet their financial needs while others have resorted to doing odd jobs for a living.
“We have seen increased house evictions of teachers, some of them have gone starving as others have committed suicide because of being hopeless. We have seen teachers doing causual jobs which is so demoralising” said Kiggundu.
He added “We are also going to have highly stressed school returnees especially teachers. They have been so stressed, they have gone through too much and have many questions on their minds. We are likely to lose many teachers and this is going to cause a very big human resource gap to the education sector.
School propriators have also not been spared by the lockdown. According to Kiggundu, many of them have accumulated so much interest on loans since they don’t have alternative source of income to service the loans.
He also revealed that over 200 schools have been listed for sale while others have been restructured into alternative businesses like guest houses and shops among others.
Kiggundu further disclosed that much as government released the 20 billion shillings for the private schools teachers’ SACCO to the Micro Finance Support Center, they are yet to know the moderities on how it will reach the intended beneficiaries.
“Since the SACCO money was released to the Micro Finance Support Center, the committee together with the relevant departments of the ministry of education have sought to engange Micro Finance Support Center and generate appropriate guidelines and moderities of accessing this money but this meeting has not materialised to date” He said
Pleas to government
These are now calling on government to reopen the schools for candidates by October 2020 to enable them sit for their final exams.
They also want government to provide concrete information on when the schools will reopen for better planning by the school owners, parents and the learners.
Kigundu says government needs to clarify on the 20 billion shillings teachers SACCO money and put in place transparent mechanisms to access it.
He also says government should consider freezing interest on school loans for the period of the lockdown since they are not earning to be able to service the loans and also consider a tax holiday when they reopen the schools to recover from the impact of COVID-19 lockdown.
Readiness of the schools
Kigundu says the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) provided by the ministry of health have been circulated to all private schools, school owners and headteachers have been trained and the schools have procured the required equipement to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 infection in the schools.
Meanwhile, Kigundu appealed to all teachers to remain calm as they await government to reopen schools and also advised school owners to prepare well knowing that government will lift the lockdown any time soon.