Notes

distributed effectively and fairly among LGs. In turn, LG leaders should recognize that, even though the education budget is large compared to those of other sectors, it is not adequate to meet the country’s education needs and should be a priority among LGs’ own-financed expenditures. Despite recent funding increases and promising policy pronouncements, the central government does not yet provide LGs with the financing or capacity-building support needed to build a high-quality education system and has not yet granted enough financial and operational autonomy to either LGs or schools.

Access to lower-secondary schooling needs to be expanded in a cost-effective way. Discontinuing the subsidies paid for supporting students in private secondary schools could lead to a higher demand for places in government secondary schools; expanding government-implemented secondary education for all will require employing more teachers and building more schools than would be necessary if other delivery models remained available.

NOTES

 1. Alasdair Fraser was a consultant on the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) technical assistance program. views expressed in this chapter do not necessarily represent the views of the DFID or the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the government of Uganda, the ODI, or the World Bank.  2. Kan and Klasen (2018) document fewer years of schooling completed after the introduction of universal primary education (UPE).  3. Per capita income in Uganda was US$643 in 2019, and government revenue amounted to approximately 14 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Government expenditures on education amount to 2.7 percent of GDP. Population growth is among the highest in the world, averaging over 3 percent annually between 2000 and 2017 (World Bank 2020).  4. The National Resistance movement (NRm) manifesto 2016–2021: Steady Progress: Taking

Uganda to modernity Through Jobs-Creation and Inclusive Development was promulgated in 2016.  5. Twaweza (2019a) found that more than one-fifth of students progressing to primary 7 (P7) are unable to read or do math at a primary 2 (P2) level.  6. Both Uwezo surveys and National Assessment of Progress in Education (NAPE) assessments reflect this pattern (UNEB 2014a).  7. The current system of LG grant support from the central government began in 1995 (Williamson 2010).  8. The IGFT Reform Program originated with the 2002 Fiscal Decentralization Strategy (FDS).  9. The average Ugandan child born in 2019 will complete seven years of schooling, the equivalent of only 4.5 years of quality schooling (World Bank 2019b). moreover, learning outcomes may have worsened since the 2014 estimate on which this assessment is based. 10. In 2007, only 11 percent of primary schools in Uganda had more than 4 out of 6 essential conditions for effective teaching (Bashir et al. 2018). 11. As many as 30 to 40 percent of students in primary 1 (P1) are age 8 or older, and 41 to 52 percent (according to reports from teachers and parents) of P1 students repeat the grade (Weatherholt et al. 2019). 12. The gross enrollment rate for preprimary education was 14 percent. UNESCO Institute for

Statistics (database), UNESCO, Paris (accessed August 2020), http://uis.unesco.org/en /country/ug. 13. The expenditure framework in the 2010–11 National Development Plan explicitly increased the share of the budget allocated to the energy and mineral development sector from 7 to 25 percent over four years, thus reducing the share to LG-delivered sectors including education. The full reduction was not implemented. 14. Government-aided private schools received “partnership” capitation grants for enrolled students until 2016–17, after which the grants started to be phased out, a process that is due to be completed in 2020–21.

15. The GER has been consistently high since shortly after UPE was introduced, which is a sign of inefficiency. This will be discussed further in the section titled Education Challenges. 16. Cities were given similar rights in 2015, but no cities had been created within the LG fiscal system as of June 2020. In practice, subdivision is to some extent controlled by central government. 17. municipal LGs are treated as equivalent to district LGs in budgeting for education but not in LG legislation. 18. Districts that subdivide create two districts, the original “parent” district and a new “child” district. 19. According to the 2019–20 Budget (moFPED 2019). As of 2020, 23.4 percent of LGs were municipal councils, and as of 2018, 23.8 percent of Ugandans lived in an urban area, including those governed by town councils and municipal councils. 20. Counts from the 2019–20 Budget (moFPED 2019). Lower levels (parishes, cells, villages and zones) are not shown in figure 5.1. 21. Local Governments Act of 1997, part 1 (21). 22. Local Governments Act of 1997, part 2 (1). 23. Local Governments Act of 1997, part 2 (1). 24. Payroll management was decentralized to LGs starting in 2013–14, and pension and gratuities payments were decentralized starting in 2015–16. 25. Subnational revenue collection authority rests at the subcounty level, and these revenues may not be fully reflected in municipal and district budgets. See Green (2015). 26. Unspent balances held by the LGs must be returned to the central government at the end of the fiscal year, although LGs can ask the central government for extensions, particularly to complete capital projects. 27. Only in urban areas are these parental contributions formalized; parents are supposed to contribute U Sh 10,400 per term per student toward the cost of hiring additional workers, including contract teachers, under the UPE policy. 28. Karlan and Linden (2016) report a lower average of US$7 per pupil in 2012–13. 29. Only 2 percent of children age 14 had completed primary school; 90 percent were still in primary school. 30. Twaweza (2019a) reported that 21.2 percent of 4-year-olds and 33.8 percent of 5-year-olds were in school (many in P1), whereas Weatherholt et al. (2019) found that 34 percent of sampled P1 students had attended any form of preprimary schooling and just 13 percent had attended a registered early childhood education (ECE) program. 31. Cilliers et al. (2018a) find this to be true in Tanzania. 32. Population estimates for 2020 show that there is gender parity in the school-age population. males ages 5 to 14 account for 14.6 percent of the national population, while females ages 5 to 14 account for 14.3 percent. The estimated primary school population (ages 6 to 12) is 3.73 million males and 3.63 million females, while for secondary education (ages 13 to 18), the numbers are 2.59 million and 2.66 million, respectively. 33. Defined as the number of students enrolled in S1 divided by the number of 13-year-olds in the population. 34. In mathematics, 48.7 percent of boys and 33.7 percent of girls performed “adequately” or better, while in biology, 26.9 percent of boys and 13.4 percent of girls performed “adequately” or better. 35. Coverage of the private sector in Uganda’s education management information system (EmIS) is patchy, and the private sector predominates at the secondary level. 36. EGRAs orally assess basic foundation skills for literacy acquisition in early grade students, including prereading skills such as listening comprehension. 37. As of late 2020, the results from the 2018 NAPE for lower secondary students had not been published. 38. In addition, UNEB revised the NAPE methodology in 2018 so the scores are not comparable over time. 39. “Acceptable” in the report on Uganda is equivalent to level 5 of the SACmEQ scale. more than one-third of students have dropped out of school by P6 (see figure 5.6), which produces selection effects. 40. See Atuhurra and Alina (2018) for a description of curriculum and examination mismatch in Uganda. 41. The National Planning Authority (2018a) has claimed that, based on a small survey, 30 percent of teachers had never had any in-service professional development.

42. These are discussed in greater detail in the section titled The IGFT in education. All sectoral grants are conditional grants because LGs must spend them within the designated sector. 43. Although a participatory process was used in 2015 to develop allocation formulas for nonwage and development grants under the IGFT reform program, changes have been made annually, and decision-making power is retained by the central government. 44. A recent overhaul of the grant guidelines for the Discretionary Development Equalization

Grant (DDEG), the multisectoral capital grant to LGs, may increase this share. 45. The current reform agenda builds on the Fiscal Decentralization Strategy (FDS) of 2002 and the Local Government Finance Commission (LGFC) review of 2012 and tackles issues outlined in a Public Expenditure Review conducted by the moFPED and other agencies in 2013 (World Bank 2013). A definitive statement, the IGFT Reform Program document, is expected to be published as part of the Uganda Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers (UgIFT) program. 46. The execution of budgeted transfers to LGs is excellent compared with most other developing countries. Transparency about releases of transfers to LGs is also high, as is budget transparency generally in Uganda (International Budget Partnership 2017). 47. The World Bank currently supports the IGFT with US$500 million. The Department for

International Development (DFID) provided technical assistance support through the

Overseas Development Institute (ODI) for the fiscal decentralization reform program to the moFPED and other agencies to operationalize the IGFT. 48. The Uganda Teacher and School Effectiveness Program (UTSEP), a project funded by the

Global Partnership for Education and the World Bank, added a further U Sh 56 billion in 2019–20. 49. UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics places Uganda 130th among 134 reporting countries for primary education spending per enrollee from 2013 to 2019. UNESCO Institute for Statistics (database), UNESCO, Paris (accessed September 2020), http://uis.unesco.org/en/country /ug. 50. The fixed component was U Sh 900,000 per year in 2007–08 and in 2019–20 was set at

U Sh 1.35 million. 51. The number of lower local governments (LLGs) increased from 968 as of 2010 (Uganda

Bureau of Statistics 2012) to 1,506 as of 2019–20 (Budget 2019–20, Online Transfer

Information management System (database), Republic of Uganda (accessed September 2020), otims.go.ug. 52. A full description of the formulas is available in World Bank (2021). 53. The performance assessment score is also used to allocate 15 percent to 50 percent of other sectors’ development grants. 54. Education sector performance measure is based on: (1) human resource planning and management; (2) monitoring and inspection; (3) governance and oversight transparency and accountability; (4) procurement and contract management; (5) financial management and reporting; and (6) social and environmental safeguards (Office of the Prime minister 2019, 2020). 55. See moFPED, Local Government Performance Improvement Plans, budget.go.ug/PIPs.

Reimbursements to the government from Uganda Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers (UgIFT) program, a large multisector World Bank project, are conditional on the successful implementation of performance assessments. Other requirements are the transparent allocation and execution of agreed formulas (aimed at improving equity) and annual real-term, nonwage budget increases until 2023–24 (aimed at improving adequacy), of which three years have already been completed. 56. See World Bank (2020) for a projection of classroom needs. 57. Cilliers, mbiti, and Zeitlin (2018a) found that, in Tanzania, after examination results were widely published, the performance of schools in the bottom quintile of achievement in each district improved partly because less-able pupils were strategically excluded from taking the examination. 58. Donor work funded by the DFID (Crawfurd and Elks 2018) has attempted to shift the government’s secondary school focus toward rewarding the most-improved secondary schools with additional capitation grants, based on the difference between the PLE and later exam attainment, but this has not been integrated into the grant’s design. 59. Publications, National Curriculum Development Center, Kampala (accessed July 2020), https://www.ncdc.go.ug/publications.