Primary School Education, Curriculum Africanisation, and Community Engagements of Teachers in the Process of Poverty Alleviation in Uganda

Abstract

The article stipulates the unseen yet useful remedies that can be utilised by primary schools to alleviate economic poverty in Uganda. The paper examines the trend of primary school education and the extent the curriculum is Africanised to engage pupils and their parents in staged progressive household income-generating projects aimed at uplifting the economic standards of households. In Uganda, the Church Missionary Society established several schools and imported a European-based education curriculum. Since then, the Europeanised type of education has never been contextualised into African learning approaches, and this has made it hard for teachers, who are accorded respect in the African culture as elders, to engage with local communities to alleviate economic poverty in Uganda. In reality, the aims of education since colonial days have undergone several revisions, but staged education curriculum developers in Uganda have never incorporated African indigenous knowledge yardstick indicators that ensure that teachers play their communal roles as: incubators, initiators, nurturers, examiners, and promoters of European-Africanised community poverty alleviation programmes. In fact, from the inception of the colonial governance up to date, several poverty eradication programmes have been implemented in Uganda, but to the dismay, most of them collapsed without realising the anticipated goals. Astonishingly, primary schools that are expected to be centres of demonstration innovations have no crafted projects geared at empowering young people with income-generating skills that can be mirrored in their homes. Yet when young people are empowered by their teachers to engage in practical subjects, they are mostly to work devotedly on simple income-generating projects. The number of young people dropping out of schools and the poor national academic performances, registered every year, tell it that the Ugandan poverty alleviation education curriculum is not African. Something bitter, disguised, and foreign is being forced down the throats of Ugandan intellectual knowledge seekers.