Are New Secondary Schools Built Where They are Needed Most in Uganda? Comparing Catholic with Public and Other Private Schools

Abstract

Low income countries in sub-Saharan Africa are confronted with a major challenge in terms of expanding access to secondary education. This is also the case in Uganda. This article considers two questions. First, where should new secondary schools be built if the aim is to reduce geographic disparities in access? Second, have new schools, and in particular faith-based schools, been built in the areas that need schools the most? The analysis considers Catholic as well as public and other private schools. Results suggest that new schools are often not located in the areas that need them the most.

Keywords:

• Catholic schools
• faith-based schools
• school construction
• lower secondary education
• Africa
• poverty
• Uganda

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Joanna Dorota Juzon and Elizabeth Ninan for sharing data on which the paper is based and to Angela Demas, Mourad Ezzine, and Kirill Vasiliev for providing comments at various stages of the analysis. Special thanks are due to Serge Theunynck for many great discussions and his advice and wisdom on this topic, and to staff from Uganda’s Ministry of Education and Ark Education Partnerships Group Uganda for useful comments and suggestions. The author is also grateful to Chata Male for preparing the maps used in the paper and to Fr. Ronald Okello Ronald and Betty Kizuula for help in identifying Catholic schools in the mapping dataset for all secondary schools.

Notes

1 There is often a perception that efforts are made by Catholic and other faith-based schools to reach underserved areas, and anecdotal evidence suggest that this is the case. However, as noted by Coulombe and Wodon (2013) for healthcare facilities in Ghana, for various reasons, Catholic facilities may not be located in poorer areas.

2 In the analysis for Tanzania, the methodology also factors in the effect of population growth to assess future demand and it considers in addition overcrowding in existing schools, but this is not required here.

3 Fort better visualization, the district of Kibaale is not included in the Figure because it is an outlier with a gross enrollment rate above 100 percent according to the various data sources used for the estimation.

4 For a few schools, data on the year of establishment is missing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Quentin Wodon

Quentin Wodon is a Lead Economist at the World Bank and a Distinguished Research Affiliate with the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame. The analysis and views expressed in this paper are those of the author only and may not reflect the views of the World Bank, its Executive Director, or the countries they represent.