Opinion: The Primary Education system in Uganda today

Over the years I have thought and reflected on Uganda’s education system with keen interest in primary education. Let me give a highlight of this.

In 1999 there were 6 million pupils receiving primary education, compared to only 2 million in 1986. Numbers received a boost in 1997 when free primary education was made available for four children per family. Only some of primary school graduates go on to take any form of secondary education. This is contingent upon them passing their Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE).
Uganda is one of East Africa's developing countries, bordered by Tanzania, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and Kenya. It occupies 236,040 square kilometres (91,140 sq mi) and has about 41.5 million people (Source: World Bank).

General Survey: Preprimary children can begin school at age of three. Most urban areas have fine preschool facilities. Preschool is very commercial, and the private sector dominates such schools. The government is concerned about the lack of regulation at this level. Fees are often seen as excessive and exclusionary. The quality of education is very uneven, as are teaching methods, facilities, and alleged violations of sound pedagogical principles of child psychology and development. The problem with the better schools is competition, which is so high for the few positions available that parents must literally enroll the child at birth to assure that the child will find a place in these preschools.
The main problem facing primary educators in Uganda is budgetary. Beyond this there is a great disparity between the education available in cities and in remote rural areas. This attracts Ugandans to cities like a magnet and is the source of many urban problems when unsuccessful students drop out and take to crime or other self-help activities to support themselves. More vocational training is being introduced into primary school curriculums in an attempt to address this problem.

Curriculum: Primary students study arithmetic, natural science, farming, health, reading, writing, music, English, religion, and physical education in grades one and two. Grades two through seven add art, crafts, language, history, geography (often of England and the United States), and cooking and domestic science for young girls. Curriculums are established by the National Curriculum Development Center (NCDC). Panels of teachers and members of examination boards, university professors, and educational inspectors review all curricula. The NCDC examines syllabi and textbooks, as well as teachers guides. They even write textbooks or recommend revisions. The Ministry of Education implements the recommendations of the NCDC. Many primary schools have libraries to encourage the habit of reading as a lifelong activity. 

Teachers: Primary school teachers are very mobile, and there is a persistent shortage of such teachers. In 1979, some 16.2 percent of approved teaching positions were unfilled. In 1980 there were 38,422 primary school teachers in almost 4,500 schools. The teacher-pupil ratio was about 1:34. Most were trained in grade three teacher training colleges. This means that these teachers have at least finished secondary school before being admitted to grade two teacher training. In the past they could teach primary school if they had finished grade seven. A few unqualified teachers from the old system are still teaching but they are being phased out.

Current education system and relevance in regard to the young ones
Having given the above background of the education system in Uganda, my focus is first on the current nursery system in this country. Most often I have felt so bad looking at the toddlers on motor bikes very early in the morning 4 to 6 parked on a single bike as early 6:00am. Is this the kind of education that we admire currently in the country? Ok, then they get to class and leave as “early” as 5:00pm, hey do you know the age bracket here (2-3 years), apart from singing and playing which is also great for their development, isn’t that early morning sleep important as well to them?. Every morning from Monday to Friday they are disrupted as they take their last morning nap.

English is the official language in Uganda yes, what about their mother tongue?. Some parents currently even punish their kids because they spoke “vernacular” at home. When should they learn their language? It is the reason that today these children will grow up into adults and they cannot speak fluently and confidently in their mother tongue. The toddlers……..

Now my upper class boys and girls out of baby, upper and middle classes (the graduates), you will be shocked at the rate they are pumped and handled with stuff. 

One evening at around 6:00pm, I followed pupils that had just left evening classes. Guess what they carried huge bags approximately 5-10kgs of books.

 I imagined and compared myself to these pupils, during my primary days in the 90’s I remember I carried about 6 to 8 books and revision seemed not to be part of me. I did it if I must but as early as primary two they do serious revision, talk of home works the parents are now part of homework session with lots of embarrassment because of the kind of questions that kids currently have to answer. As a result of the hard core questions they resort to their saviors’ the parents who also have to google to get the answers, oh the Uganda education system!!.

And now the school fees, the amount of money they pay currently is equivalent or more than what University students pay for the 4 months semester and they will pay this in three months. Because UPE seems not to be performing, affording parents will run to these expensive private institutions. The requirements are very annoying if I may use that word, several rolls of toilet paper, rims of paper, brooms name them. My question is has the Government done enough to regulate levying of these “business” schools fees or its laisevez?? 

In a nutshell I have so many questions here with fewer answers and if they are not addressed am afraid we may be headed for a tougher, too expensive and challenging education system in Uganda. Much as it is said “If you think education is expensive then try ignorance”, at this rate many may actually go for ignorance. 

The writer is a blogger and Computer Scientist.

OPINION: Social media, the impact to productive work

By Yosia Baluku: 
Interacting with friends and family across long distances has been a concern of humans for centuries. As social animals, people have always relied on communication to strengthen their relationships. When face-to-face discussions are impossible or inconvenient, Just to recall imagine the letters we wrote and were sent from one person to another till the intended receiver across. Later two other innovations came into picture in the last decade of 1800s; the radio in 1891 and telephone in 1890. These are still in use to date. Humans have dreamed up plenty of creative solutions. 

Technology began to change very rapidly in the 20th Century. After the first super computers were created in the 1940s, scientists and engineers began to develop ways to create networks between those computers, and this would later lead to the birth of the Internet.

It is believed that the first recognizable social media site, Six Degrees, was created in 1997. It enabled users to upload a profile and make friends with other users. In 1999, the first blogging sites became popular, creating a social media sensation that’s still popular today.

After the invention of blogging, social media began to explode in popularity. Sites like MySpace and LinkedIn gained prominence in the early 2000s, and sites like Photobucket and Flickr facilitated online photo sharing. YouTube came out in 2005, creating an entirely new way for people to communicate and share with each other across great distances.
By 2006, Facebook and Twitter both became available to users throughout the world. These sites remain some of the most popular social networks on the Internet. Other sites like Tumblr, Spotify, Foursquare and Pinterest began popping up to fill specific social networking niches.

Today, there is a tremendous variety of social networking sites, and many of them can be linked to allow cross-posting. This creates an environment where users can reach the maximum number of people without sacrificing the intimacy of person-to-person communication. We can only speculate about what the future of social networking may look in the next decade or even 100 years from now, but it seems clear that it will exist in some form for as long as humans are alive. And now the current whatsapp bandwagon oh my;
But all that said my concern here is to look at the impact of all this evolution on productive work be it in office, on the farm and everywhere else that work takes place.
The so many pop ups with several sounds on the phone keep abstracting their concentration and at the end of the day nearly 2 thirds of the time is spent checking out those videos, funny pictures, animations and the entire hoax involved.

According to TeamLease World of Work Report, an average of 2.35 hours is spent accessing social media at work every day and 13 per cent of the total productivity is lost owing to the social media indulgence alone.
According to the same report, Facebook is the most visited social media platform. Out of the 62 per cent employees who accessed social media during working hours, nearly 83 per cent of them spend significant time browsing Facebook.
I also think that currently whatsapp may have taken over these statistics.

On the other side however social media has been and still a great weapon of information dissemination, most organizations currently have changed their way of communication KRC inclusive. Much as others may think it’s time wasting to the contrary it’s a very powerful tool. Within a tweak of an eye information is everywhere all over the world.
By the way most employers have also relied on social media as a means of recruitment process to reduce recruitment costs.
Many more good things have happened on social media including relationships though it’s not a better option for this in my opinion and I would not recommend that.

Conclusively social media stimulates collaboration and knowledge sharing between individuals which can lead to increased or decreased productivity. However it (social media) should be channeled in an effective way to get maximum results from employees as there could be pitfalls employees could succumb to if left unattended. 

The writer is a Computer Science Specialist.

New online auction system launched in Uganda

This is a very great innovation, we hope it works perfectly.

Credit: Daily monitor-Uganda

Ugandans can now participate in auctioning online, thanks to a new portal.

Auctions in many parts of the world demand a certain level of physical presence, and according to Mr Trevor Rukundo, the, sales director, DafaBet Uganda, the company wants to bring "consumers and wholesalers as well as manufacturers in one online market space".  

The intention, according to Mr Rukundo is for participants to have the luxury of time to make decisions of buying and selling online within a certain time frame.

In these transactions, bid amounts are submitted through mobile money. Each item has a minimum bid requirement and every bid should be higher than the minimum amount required for the particular auction item, by atleast Shs1,000.

"The lowest unique bid wins the auction. Amounts must also be unique and not identical to any other amounts. Auctions close after a specified number of bids have been received and winners are notified," Mr Rukundo added.

Was great celebrating this

Was a great feeling being part of success celebrations at KRC.

This was right after running for health.

Hacking your system before others do that.

All computer systems are prone to attack, so some organisations make use of ethical hackers to show them the loopholes so that they improve the security 

Some Hollywood movies have focused their plot on cyber-crime. The story will revolve around someone hacking into the computer system of an organisation and there will be another trying to counter the attack for the greater good. This is what can be described as ethical hacking.

An ethical hacker is a computer and networking expert who attempts to penetrate a computer system or network on behalf of its owners for the purpose of finding security vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could exploit.

Ethical hacking is a positive form of information security. It is also known as penetration testing, intrusion testing or red teaming.

Express permission
The first use of ethical hacking occurred in the 1970s when the US government used groups of experts called ‘red team’ to hack down its own computer system.
It has become a sizable sub-industry within the information security market.

An ethical hacker is sometimes called a legal or white hat hacker and the opposite, a black hat, a term that comes from the cowboy movies where the bad guy wore a black hat.
It is important to note that for hacking to be considered ethical, the hacker must obtain express permission from the owner to probe their network and identify potential risks.

Felix Kitaka, a computer programmer, says ethical hacker is a term that is normally frowned upon by some security professionals who see it as a contradiction and prefer the term, penetration tester.

“Many company websites can find themselves victim to malicious hackers and this usually puts their content at risk. When creating a website or a computer system, it is very important to test how penetrable it would be in case a malicious person went in and put the content at risk,” he explains.

Identify gaps
Ronald Eyit, a network administrator at World Vision, says it is very beneficial for organisations to engage security assessment of the production environment by carrying out tasks such network systems penetration tester.
It is because this identifies weaknesses in the network systems in place and a security expert can advise or propose intervention methods.

He adds that it also helps to identify gaps in the team that management can act upon, for instance hire a security consultant to handle the identified gaps or send the current staff for further training.

Techtarget.com best describes the method used by ethical hackers to penetrate a system and bypass its defence.
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Evaluate security
However, unlike their less principled counterparts (black hat hackers), rather than taking advantage of any vulnerabilities found, they document them and provide actionable advice on how to fix them so the organisation can improve its overall security.

Kitaka explains the purpose of ethical hacking is to evaluate the security of a network or system’s infrastructure.
It entails finding and attempting to exploit any vulnerability to determine whether unauthorised access or other malicious activities are possible.

A paper published by SANS Institute on penetration testing, Assessing Your Overall Security Before Attackers Do, vulnerabilities tend to be found in poor or improper systems configuration, known and unknown hardware or software flaws and operational weakness in process of technical counter-measures.

It is also advises that before commissioning an organisation or individual to penetrate your system, it is considered best practice you read their service level and code of conduct agreements.

This covers how testing will be carried out, and how the results will be handled, as they are likely to contain sensitive information about how the system tested.

Useful way
Eyit points out that everyone can be hacked; schools, hospitals, banks. So, it depends on the motive of the hacker.
“Someone can hack to prove or show that they can or to prove that you are vulnerable; another may hack to smear a campaign especially if it is a business rival,” he adds.

A successful test does not mean the network is 100 per cent secure, but it should be able to withstand automated attacks and unskilled hackers.

The goal of penetration testing is to find flaws in network applications and operating platforms that could be exploited by attackers or simply cause business interruption of sorts.

Regular penetration testing can be a useful way to determine with a higher degree of certainty that flaws do exist.
However in order to effectively find these issues before attackers, the testing routine you put together needs to be focused on consistent repeatable testing.

As an IT practitioner i find this very important information to share.

Credit: Monitor publications

Ntoroko District floods again

Ntoroko District suffers another flood disaster. Yesterday the people of Ntoroko mostly from the areas of Masaka, Buyenje, Makindye, Budiba and Kiranga- the Greater Rwebisengo Zone (Bweramule, Butungama and Rwebisengo Sub-counties). Roads are cut off, Schools are not accessible, heath facilities out of reach, houses, Pit latrines, farms and gardens all submerged and every body is stuck about what happens next. the Primary Seven Candidates have a briefing on Friday, 31st October, 2014 and P.L.E on Monday, 3rd November, 2014 but the Schools cannot be accessed what next ? how can they be helped? The patients are helpless, and as if that is not enough there can be cholera out break any minute from now.we call upon all the stakeholder to act immediately since this is an emergency that needs quick response from every corner. the CSO's community like the Red cross, Save the Children, World Vision, UNICEF, the District leadership, the OPM (Office of the Prime Minister) and many others, let us help our Brothers and sisters in Ntoroko. The photos below show it all.

Knowledge Aquisition

I joined the rest of the participants in  various courses that were conducted by MS-TCDC Arusha-Tanzania.

The one week course that ran from 13^th-17^th October 2014 attracted participants from different countries among which were Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe

Courses like Tax justice campaign, Social Accountability, Data Analysis (using SPSS) among others were offered and that is what i enrolled for as these are in my line of work.

The trainings were completely practical giving the context of real world in relation to what is being done and the staff returned with the skills and knowledge to continuously support them in their day to day work.

It was such a great opportunity for the knowledge gained at this wonderful institution. Participants were later awarded certificates of participation and attendance.