By IPS Correspondents
MUKONO, Apr 15 1998 (IPS)

Julius Namisano, a teacher at Kisowera Primary School in this southern district believes that it is a fact of life that boys outnumber girls in school.

“It is the most natural thing to happen since the tradition here is that parents see more value in their sons compared to the daughters,” he explains.

But Namisano’s view no longer reflects the situation in Ugandan primary schools where more girls are not only attending school, but performing at the top of their class.

Out of 761 pupils in the Kisowera Primary School rural school, some 50 kilometres from Kampala, the capital, 420 are girls. In neighbouring Mpoma Secondary School, girls stay in school longer and even perform better on examinations than the boys. “Last year, the best student in our school was a girl,” says Nakimera Dativa, a second grade student in the school.

It has become a common trend for girls to outshine boys in schools around this East African country. Each year, girls perform outstandingly on national primary and secondary school exams.

Namisano admits that despite the fact that many people still hold on to traditional beliefs, there are signs of a change in society’s attitude towards the education of girls. “Girls here have been given the chance and are proving that they can learn,” he says.

“The local pattern here was that poor families saved all their resources for boys since they would grow up to be heads of homes,” he says, adding that in most cases, the wealth acquired from marrying off daughters would be used to pay for the sons’ education.

Uganda’s Universal Primary Education (UPE) initiative has been instrumental in getting more girls into school. Through the programme, in large families, four children, two of whom must be girls, are entitled to free primary education.

“By insisting on a mimimum of two girls from each family, we are giving more girls a chance they may otherwise be denied,” an official in the education ministry says.

According to the official, who declined to be named, the initiative ensures that education reaches a larger number of disadvantaged children, especially girls. “Girls are naturally the first to drop out of school as result of poverty,” he adds.

Besides the UPE initiative, the government has taken other steps to keep girls in school. The gender ministry, through a radio, television and newspaper campaign, has advocated against early marriages.

And on the streets and in village shops, it is hard to ignore the glaring messages on posters, such as ‘keep your girls in school’ or ‘children cannot be wives’.

Since 1996, President Yoweri Museveni’s government has focused on strengthening the position of women in its economy by raising their value through increasing the quality of their education. “There has been a high illiteracy rate among women, increasing their workload at home and lack of money,” an official in the education ministry said.

Official figures show that by 1994, the standard of education for girls and women was very low. Sixty-four percent of the women were illiterate, compared to 40 percent men. And, about 48 percent, or half of the girls in primary school, dropped out.

Women form 51 percent of Uganda’s population of 22 million people. The Government Statement on Women, published in 1996, attributes the low literacy levels for both men and women to the erosion of the quality of education in Uganda by war and economic decline.

To further facilitate girls’ advancement in school, the Education Ministry has adopted an affirmative action policy for girls entering tertiary institutions. This has boosted enrolment of girls in Makerere, Uganda’s national university.

Figures extracted from ‘Men and Women In Uganda 1998’, a publication of the gender ministry, show that as a result of this ‘positive discrimination’ the proportion of women undergraduates entering Makerere increased from 34 percent in 1994 to 35 perecent in 1995. This is however, still considered too low.

The benefits of the new education policy however, have yet to reach other areas in Uganda such as the war-torn north where people live in daily fear of rebel attacks.

UNICEF says the rebel groups fighting against Museveni’s government for the last 12 years have abducted more than 8000 children from northern Uganda, training the boys to fight and using the girls as sex slaves.

In Gulu, a district on the border with Sudan, more than 20 schools in villages surrounding the town have been closed down for fear of rebel attacks.

World Vision houses 323 former captive children for counselling. “We detain the girls more than boys since they are more traumatised,” says Joyce Ojara, a counsellor in the centre.

At Unyama, a displaced camp on the outskirts of Gulu town, 17 of the displaced schools have been combined into one big school. Teachers displaced from as far as neighbouring Kitgum distrtict give lessons as government soldiers guard the camp.

People living in the camp say although there are government efforts to provide education for children affected by the war, they are disadvantaged by the insecurity forcing them to scamper for the safety of streets in town. In Gulu alone, there are more than 2000 such children, many of them girls, according to Rural Focus Uganda (RUFOU), an NGO in Gulu town.

Jessica Ochirowijok, who runs RUFOU, says her organisation gives such children vocational training to help them acquire skills like carpentry, weaving and bricklaying to help them grow up into useful people. “Everybody is poor here so children have given up on formal education,” she says.

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