Educational attainment, household education expenditure and learning outcomes in Uganda

Abstract

Uganda has implemented several education policies and programmes such as the Universal Primary and Universal Secondary Education policies to ensure completion of the seven years of primary education and ultimately 11 years of schooling inclusive of lower secondary education. However, education attainment and learning outcomes remain below the national development targets. similarly, household education spending has been growing and likely to impede the attainment of better education outcomes among low-income earners that cannot afford to educate their children. The study's general objective is to examine educational attainment, household education expenditure and learning outcomes in Uganda. Specifically, it examines the effect of household education expenditure on education attainment, household education expenditure differences between the poor and the rich, and the effect of school governance on primary education learning outcomes. The first empirical paper uses the random effects ordered probit model and Uganda National Household Survey (UNHS) 2019/20. The second paper employs the Tobit model to examine household education expenditure differences between the poor and the rich to understand who pays more. The third paper employs logistic regression models to assess how school governance factors affect the learning outcomes in primary three and six education. The findings confirm the positive association between household education expenditure and education attainment; poor households spend a larger share of their income on education; and the school governance factors were found to significantly impact learning outcomes at primary level. In light of this, the study recommends that government needs to encourage willing and able households to contribute to education as this will augment the dwindling and dismal government resources, adopting a different cost-sharing approach to public education spending as augmented by household education spending, promoting early school enrollment by prioritizing pre-primary education and strengthening internal controls within schools.