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skills, job opportunities, and creative thinking, which are further developed at school through interactions with various kinds of people and possible mentors. My belief is shared by Kathleen Blanco, the 54th Governor of Louisiana, who tried to persuade her grief-stricken citizens after the devastating Hurricane Katrina disaster that education is important. “Think about it: Every educated person is not rich, but almost every educated person has a job and a way out of poverty. So education is a fundamental solution to poverty” (Blanco 32). In this case, Blanco identified education as one of the rebuilding blocks of Louisiana, and I believe such an approach could work to eliminate poverty and slums in Uganda. My research aims to raise awareness of a correlation between slum conditions and education. What, though, is a slum? According to UN-Habitat, a slum is a household or a group of individuals living under the same roof in an urban area who lack one or more of the following: 1. Durable housing of a permanent nature that protects against extreme climate conditions. 2. Sufficient living space, which means not more than three people sharing the same room. 3. Easy access to safe water in sufficient amounts at an affordable price. 4. Access to adequate sanitation in the form of a private or public toilet shared by a reasonable number of people. 5. Security of tenure that prevents forced evictions. (UN-Habitat) As this definition suggests, slums are not the
best place to live due to unhealthy, unsafe, and poor conditions. There have been many research articles written on life and poverty in the slums that provide an overview of how people in slums attain education. According to Pauline Rose, Director of the United Nations 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, “As we [the UN] have made improvements in getting more children into school, those who are left behind are those that are hardest to reach” (qtd. in Joselow). These children are hard to reach because they live in slums. According to Ramaswamy et al.’s study on the right to education in the slums of India, “the life of the poorest households revolves around the daily survival in the margins of life” (293). The children are not able to get an education because they cannot afford it; the households in which they live concentrate on fulfilling the basic needs to ensure that everyone in the household survives. Therefore, education, which should be a basic need attained by everyone in the world, is lacking in slums. The people in such areas are cut off from the rest of the world when it comes to educational opportunities. In addition to Ramaswamy et al.’s findings on scarce opportunities for education, Oketch et al. note in their research on education policy in Kenya that a third of the parents in the slums surveyed took their children to low-cost, poorlyfacilitated schools. Children were taken to such poorly-facilitated schools because of poverty (i.e., families cannot afford a better school). In “Free Primary Education Policy,” Oketch et al. find that 83.87% of the schools in the study sample Volume 3
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