Uganda’s Education Ministry has lately been counting signposts. An official last week admitted that on her daily commute into Kampala, she counts twenty signboards advertising “international schools,” many operating from converted residential houses, offering programmes barely distinguishable from the national curriculum, except the dollar-denominated fees.
The new standards now require these schools to declare which curriculum they actually follow and submit to inspection, a move that exposes a larger regional question worth scrutiny well beyond Uganda’s borders. Is education meant to prepare a child to manage in the society they will actually inherit, or another society that, for most families involved, exists mainly as an aspiration?
