Education minister, also First Lady, Janet Museveni has told officials in her ministry to brave for tough financial times ahead of the anticipated budgetary cuts next financial year.
Speaking to journalists after releasing the 2016 Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) results yesterday, the minister acknowledged that the budgetary cuts will not only affect the education ministry but all other ministries.
According to the proposed budget framework paper for 2017/18, the ministry of education and sports budget will be cut from 12% to 10%. Janet said that all ministries’ budgets will be cut to cater for funds for irrigation.
In the FY 2016/17, Education was allocated Shs 2.7 trillion which is likely to drop by 2%. The minister noted that because of the shortages of food in the country due to climate change, the government will focus on irrigation to boost agriculture.
“All ministries do actually have a cut this financial year because government wants to focus on a programme we’ve not been doing before. We want to start irrigation in agriculture because the climate change is bringing problems. We’re having shortages in food and we cannot depend on natural rain anymore. So in order for government to start irrigation, it had to cut budgets on all ministries so that we can give more funding to agriculture,” she said.
She appealed to members in the education sector to be ready to sacrifice. Janet however said that funding should not explain the poor performance or failure to have education in the country. She added that parents in rural areas must play a role and not leave all responsibilities to government.
“Be willing to make some sacrifices where necessary because if you can’t get what you require, what can you do? Should you give up altogether? If we give up who will do what we must do? Our country is ours, we cannot just abandon it and we can’t wait for other people to come and do the work. We must do. The advice I give to my colleagues wherever we are serving this country, we must serve and know that sometimes we are required to make sacrifices and we should be ready to make them. We should be willing to make them. If we don’t, we shall delay those problems for future generations.”
Results of the 2016 PLE examinations show that urban areas performed better than rural districts. The performing districts were Serere, Namutumba, Luuka, Kween, Mayuge, Kaliro, Kyankwanzi, Bulambuli and Iganga among others.
The poor performance of most schools in rural areas is attributed to lack of motivation for teachers to be in the hard-to-reach areas which continue to register many school dropouts.