Chapter 7: School Fees
Between 1990 and 2007, sixteen different countries in sub-Saharan Africa used national education policy to formally abolish school fees. Implementing its Universal Primary Education Policy in 1997, Uganda was the third country in sub-Saharan Africa to do so. School fee abolition is typically understood along a single dimension: access. Any cost associated with attending school is seen as discouraging access; conversely, efforts to reduce costs are seen as improving access. Little to no research has investigated the connection to quality. In this chapter, analyzing a school savings program presents the opportunity to investigate how an intervention that encouraged the payment of school fees relates to both access and quality. Secondary analysis of a randomized controlled trial and research questions on mediation and moderation are used to explore this issue.
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In 1913, Uganda’s Board of Education stated, “Schools have to be built with money from school fees or from gifts from chiefs . . . funds will not be drawn upon for the purpose of building schools and running them” (Ssekamwa, 1997). Teachers, however, were provided by the board. In 2015, on the campaign trail, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni explained: “When we started [Universal Primary Education], we wanted to share jobs where your parents would provide uniforms, exercise books, packed lunch, so that the government would pay teachers, build teachers’ houses and school facilities.” Museveni then proposed a new arrangement: “In order to support our children, we are going to buy them exercise books, text books, mathematical sets, pens and pencils. The parents will remain with the job of buying uniforms and providing lunch” (New Vision, 2015).
As these quotations illustrate, Ugandans have been discussing school fees and other education payments for more than one hundred years. The debate concerns not whether or not to have school fees, but specific expenses such as tuition, school lunches, or uniforms, and whose responsibility it is to provide them. Given the distance between policy and practice, there is also a significant difference between intent and the reality on the ground. In response to Museveni’s aforementioned 2015 campaign promise, for example, a recent newspaper article ran with the headline “Pupils Wait for Museveni’s Books, Pens Two Years Later” (Mufumba, 2018). At the same time, the Minister of Education criticizes parents for “abandoning their responsibilities and putting every burden on the government and Museveni,” as one journalist summarized (Rumanzi, 2016).