THE ROLE OF NGOS' IN SUPPORTING QUALITY EDUCATION IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN UGANDA

Education is a conscious process designed to change or bring about behaviour patter of individual in each society towards desirable ends as perceived in society. Education as a service provided by government, private sectors and NGO’s is used as an instruments to bring about corrective and necessary measures in society. In Uganda many of the parents valve education but cannot afford to send their children to school and provide the necessary requirements like uniform, books and others this is because Uganda is among the low developed countries.

During the colonial days the Uganda education system developed largely because of the initiative of the voluntary organization especially those of the Christian missionaries who helped to provide facilities as well as elite groups. So the guidelines for educational development were highlighted in 1963 castle commission and the main aim was to emphasis the opportunities to quality education to all Ugandan.

Uganda’s education is based on seven years in primary school, four years in ordinary secondary school and two years in advanced level and later to university for three to five years. This system is managed by Ministry of Education. The approach of teaching in these schools is quite different from that of indigenous education because of the western influence. Western education relied on reading and writing and so like in Uganda today. Due to budgetary constraint, the government of Uganda has been faced with a task of providing funds to cater for the education sector and kisoko sub county schools in Tororo district have not escaped from such problems and this has led to low quality of education in Uganda and it’s due to such reasons as to why NGO’s came up to support the education system so as to improve on its quality.

Recent years have witnessed explosive emergences of NGO’s and were seen as possible alternatives to government’s overstretched effort in addressing the needs of the population especially those not reached by official development programmes. In Uganda the establishment of NGO’s dates far back to the colonial days right from its early inception in the country and the during 1960’s the relative prosperity of the newly independent Uganda favored a rapid development of NGO’s and these organization were largely foreign and international, although later on local ones were formed with the help of foreign funding. Most NGO’s assumed a substitutive role for of some of the social services formerly provided by the state and these included the following health, education environment and infrastructures. It is within this period that education as an issue of NGO’s agenda assumed great importance, this was largely because there was increasing dropout from school and decline in the quality of education due to lack of classrooms, untrained teachers, lack of scholastic materials for the pupils. Its upon on this reasons that plan Uganda had to sprung up in Tororo district.

Plan Uganda as an NGO’s in Tororo district a charity organization, which operates in most rural areas. Its focus for the five years are support school fees payment through scholarship programs, improving the learning environment by assisting communities with the construction of classrooms and the purchase of furniture and school supplies, strengthening and promoting awareness among the communities of the needs and importance of education and rights of children, developing educational materials with collaboration of students and plan staffs.

This study seeks to establish the role of NGO’s in supporting quality education in Kisoko Sub County. Plan Uganda will be used as a case study but finding will be generalized to other NGO’s operating in a similar setting like World vision, Aims etc

CHALLENGE THAT NGO’S FACE IN SUPPORTING QUALITY EDUCATION IN UGANDA.
NGO’s have played a distinctive role in development and face a different range of challenged and these include: -
Creating awareness
Creating awareness is one of the challenges faced by NGO’s due to negative attitudes of the parents concerning the importance education of children especially on the side of girls who are considered to bring wealth for the family, so girls seldomly participate in schools.

Lack of funds
This is inadequate to facilitate the various activities and programmes to promote quality education since they rely mainly on donor funds and its difficult to mobilize resources from parents.
Changes in organizational policies
NGO’s are faced with the challenges of maintaining organizational education policies to those of the government. The education policies are not practical with strategies in addressing needs of particular vulnerable children. Therefore the challenge is NGO’s to educate for designing of more education policies and new guidelines for development of curriculum in schools.
Lack of credibility and accountability
NGO’s are faced with the challenge of credibility and accountability, in some schools because they have tried to inflate school fees figures especially private owned schools whereby headteachers give in more children to benefit from school children to benefit from school fees and yet some of these children are no officially registered by Plan uganda. Sometimes there is lack of community contribution towards school constructions and other related projects.
Eliminating discrimination
The vulnerable children particularly needed materials and social services. The challenges of NGO are to provide these services. There are increased number of orphaned children who are less likely to attend school and these are likely to have illness than other children. In most cases a number of disabled children don’t attend school because of scarcity of public transport and lack of even simple devices such as clutches or wheel chairs thus disabled children will clearly not be able to take full advantage of existing education.