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Abstract
The past 25 years have witnessed sweeping educational reforms in Uganda. The introduction of ‘free’ Universal Primary Education (UPE, in 1998) and Universal Secondary Education (USE, in 2007) has raised social expectations about access to quality education. Over the same period the population of young people in Uganda has also grown dramatically. As a result hundreds of new primary and secondary schools have been established across the country. This article examines the social and economic consequences for a rural part of Southwest Uganda. Bringing together secondary data from national household surveys with detailed ethnographic research, the article highlights families’ material and social investments in schooling. It explores the costs faced by even the poorest households whose children attend ‘free’ government schools. Despite public investment, the poor quality of state provision has led to public frustration and demands for reforms. Survey data demonstrate that, as a result, wealthier households are investing in education, sending their children to private schools to benefit from smaller class sizes and better learning outcomes. The article describes how people use a range of social arrangements, including rotating savings and credit associations to manage school fees and access credit in this part of Uganda. Drawing on recent work by Graeber and others, we argue that people are creating new social relationships within these savings clubs. Whilst managing their financial commitments, people invoke and rework existing idioms of reciprocity, interdependence and patronage. The use of human capital theory to explain schooling choices in relation to individual economic or social ‘returns’ downplays the sociality of these arrangements. We argue that educational commitments are now an integral part of the Ugandan social landscape, generating aspiration, nurturing networks and creating new inequalities.
Acknowledgements
Richard Vokes has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Bugamba since 2000 with the help of his research assistants. The ethnographic data have been jointly analysed by Vokes and Mills.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Kajubi, “Educational Reform,” 323; Heyneman ‘Education during a period of austerity’.
2. UPE became the second Millennium Development Goal in September 2000.
3. Cheney, Pillars of the Nation.
4. Bategeka and Okurut, Overseas Development Institute, Policy Brief.
5. Uganda Bureau of Statistics, Uganda National Household Survey, Citation2012.
6. UWEZO, Are Our Children.
7. Omollo et al., “Enrolment in USE Schools.”
8. Sen, Development as Freedom, One study which has examined the wider social effects of Uganda's UPE experiment is Meinhart, Hopes in Friction.
9. Uganda Bureau of Statistics. Uganda National Census, Citation2012.
10. See Grogan, “Universal Primary Education”; Nishimura et al., “Impacts of the Universal.”
11. Nishimura et al., “Impacts of the Universal,” 164–166; Cheney, Pillars of the Nation and Hedger et al., Sector Budget Support. See also Penny et al., Education sector reform.
12. Kavuma, “Free Universal.”
13. Omollo et al., “Enrolment in USE Schools.”
14. Ssenkabirwa, “Report Pins Schools.”
15. Wane and Martin, Education and Health Services.
16. Uganda Bureau of Statistics, UNHS.
17. Madhavan-Nambiar et al., Analysis of Various Household.
18. Fine and Rose, “Education and the Post-Washington Consensus.”
19. Dreze and Sen, An Uncertain Glory.
20. Kafeero, “Teachers Strike.”
21. Mehrotra and Delamonica, “Household Costs,” 51.
22. New Vision, June 6, 2013. See http://www.newvision.co.ug/news/643671-students-loan-scheme-starts-next-month.html [Accessed December 17, 2013].
23. Okurut et al., Microfinance and Poverty Reduction.
24. Ardener and Burman, Money-Go Round.
25. Gugerty, “You Can’t Save Alone.”
26. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 6–9, 72–73.
27. Doornbos, Not All the King’s Men, 117–131.
28. Okurut et al., Microfinance and Poverty Reduction, 6–10.
29. Shipton, Credit between Cultures, 174.
30. Bohannan, “Some Principles.”
31. Vokes, “On ‘The Ultimate Patronage Machine.’”
32. Graeber, Debt, 8.
33. Ibid., 9.
34. The earliest type of patron–client relationship, kugabira, involved a form of cattle exchange and probably developed around 1300–1400 ad (Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 223–224).
35. Graeber, “Debt, Violence, and Impersonal Markets.”
36. Lit: ‘the fourth hour’. In Runyankore/Rukiga, ‘clock time’ begins at 6 am (i.e. at dawn).
37. Okwezi means both ‘month’ and ‘moon’.
38. Thompson, “Work-discipline.”
39. Shipton, Credit between Cultures, 120.
40. Ferguson, “Declarations of Dependence”; Graeber, “Debt, Violence, and Impersonal Markets” and Sen, Citation2009; See also Krige “Letting money work for us”.