The principal economist at the education ministry, Nelson Wanambi, has called for a compliance policy on data provision by all education institutions and development partners.
Speaking at a validation workshop for the first-ever Uganda National Education Accounts (NEA) report recently, Wanambi said there was a serious need for the policy to harmonise information flow in the sector.
“The idea was to get a comprehensive view on funding education but we could not get information from some private primary and secondary schools and data on off-budget funds from education development partners,” Wanambi said.
“Yet, when we want this information, it should be declared and given to us so that we can be able to estimate our budget expenditures on education.”
Launched in 2013, the NEA report is a collaborative effort of the ministry, Ubos, Unesco International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-Unesco), the IIEP-Pôle de Dakar, and the Unesco Institute for Statistics (UIS) to track financial flows to education from the year 2009 to 2014.
With financial support of the Global Partnership for Education, Uganda was selected as one of eight countries to take part in the three-year project. According to the report, most of the expenditure by private institutions is not readily available to the sector.
“Financing from income-generating activities of schools and institutions is poorly captured and reported,” says the report.
Unesco policy planning programme specialist Ousmane Diouf said some private schools deliberately refused to give them their financial records.
“It looks like private institutions do not report to anyone financially. One person there told me that ‘this is private property. It is our school and we don’t have to report our financial records’,” Ousmane said.
His concern came about after realising that private institutions in Senegal, Kenya, Congo Brazzaville and Gulf Arab states financially report directly to the education ministry, despite charging higher fees compared to Uganda.
He asked that private institutions be tasked to report to the ministry since schools are not set up as a social service but to make money. However, Wanambi offered that some school owners were worried that they would incur heavier taxation if they disclosed their revenue streams.
“In the interim, as the policy is awaited, a circular should be issued to all accounting officers in education institutions to provide the financial details,” he said.
However, John Bosco Mujjumba, the chairman National Private Educational Institutions Associations-Uganda, an umbrella body for private owners, was quick to defend his counterparts.
“Government cannot demand to know our financial status when it does not pay our teachers, buy us scholastic material or build or even paint our structures,” Mujjumba said.
Speaking in proverbial terms, he added that one cannot ask to be paid by someone who “owes them nothing”.
nangonzi@observer.ug