School Priorities - SNV

Information Management
On any given day in Uganda, 20-30% of primary school teachers do not come to school,
one of the highest absenteeism rates in the world. With wages making up more than 70%
of primary education government spending, absent teachers drain the education budget of
between USD $30-60 million each year according to a 2007 Ministry report. Even worse,
absent teachers lead to absent pupils. After all, why keep going to school if there is no one
there to teach you?
Teacher
Absent
With the country’s monitoring mechanisms rendered dysfunctional due to
spotty electricity and understaffing, attendance figures are not compiled
quickly enough at the district level for educators to tackle the teacher
attendance problem. When figures are compiled, they either do not
make it back to the schools or are in a format they cannot easily access,
providing little incentive for them to collect accurate data.
The districts of Kiboga and Mbale were particularly affected by
absentee teachers but although they knew teacher absenteeism was a
problem, they didn’t have useful tools to combat it. SNV guided the
districts to a high-tech, low-cost solution: mobile phones. If you can
use your mobile phone to send a text message, why couldn’t you use
it to send attendance data?
Why keep going to school if there
is no one there to teach you?
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