School Priorities - SNV

Community Participation
responsibility for creating quality education by
getting communities and parents to buy in to
the education system and create solutions to
their common problems.
National and international players continue
to try to prescribe the environment in
which a quality education can be delivered.
It is a school environment with a limitless
supply of textbooks and materials, gleaming
classrooms and immaculately-dressed pupils.
But few schools or communities are like
this. Prescriptive national and international
programmes don’t fully appreciate the local
context, passing over information that could
guide effective ground operations. After all,
the perceptions, actions and decisions of local
schools and communities shape the extent to
which a quality education can be provided.
The continuing gap between national and
international interventions and local realities
demonstrates that actors must encourage
community participation if they hope to
integrate theory with practice.
The following stories look at several
relationships between local schools and their
surrounding communities. Together, these
relationships are referred to as “community
participation”.
Community participation is a participatory
strategy or approach that opens up education
service delivery processes so that they can
benefit from the input of all stakeholders,
namely children, local communities, teaching
staff, district education officials and private
education practitioners.
Involving these different groups can enrich
and improve access, retention and leadership
in primary education provision. By working
together, these groups can find appropriate
solutions to common challenges within their
schools, such as tackling inequity, training good
leaders and sustaining the educational system.
Community participation helps these groups
feel ownership of the interventions taking place
in their schools.
In the following stories, SNV describes its
experiences of what has worked and what has
not with regard to community participation.
Readers may have questions about what
community participation means. For instance,
is it about providing financial resources or
labour force? Or is it about being able to
participate and decide? These questions
are explored throughout the stories, which
throw light on the approaches applied to
create an environment in which schools and
communities work closely together to provide
all Ugandan children with a quality education.
Children First demonstrates the power of
contributions from Kumi pupils and parents
to school management. In the article Junior
Achievement, Mpigi students discover how to
apply what they have learned in school as they
become active members of the community. In
District Education Ordinances, Arua District
seeks to make parents and community
members take responsibility for combating
absenteeism. School Lunches showcases
Kiboga District’s efforts to provide lunch
to an additional 4000 students. And, finally,
Community Leads the Way shows the creative
local solutions that Kyenjojo parents developed
to address school problems.
Each community is different and therefore
developed its own solutions. While the
following stories show a diversity of contexts
and solutions, they also put forward lessons
learned to guide replication in other
communities.
“Quality education is not acquired in isolation from the social setting in which students
live. It embraces the notion of education as an empowering process which promotes
social change and contributes to building a just and democratic society. „
— Beyond Access: Transforming Policy and Practice for Gender Equality in Education
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