Census on schools is good for planning purposes
Parliament issued a three-month ultimatum to the Ministry of Education and Sports, to recover Shs3.9Bn given to Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) meant for conducting a census for the education sector.
This is after the Bureau failed to deliver the work within the stipulated period agreed upon by the two entities.
The decision by the lawmakers was part of the recommendation contained in Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee on the Report of the Auditor General on Public Universities for 2021/2022 where the MPs expressed concerns that the absence of the census was crippling planning for the education sector.
The Auditor General revealed that the Ministry of Education signed a memorandum of understanding with UBOS on the 5th of August 2019, in which the Bureau was hired to carry out data collection (enumeration) for the comprehensive Education Institutions baseline and complete the exercise by 30th April 2020.
UBOS was also required to present the final accountability and completion report to the funding parties by July 2020 and following the signing of the MOU, Ministry of Education advanced Shs5,549,282,800 to UBOS and by the closure of the Project, 31st July 2020, Shs1,649,282,800 had been utilized and accounted for leaving an outstanding amount of Shs3.9Bn.
However, three years down the road, there has been no census done by UBOS raising doubt as to whether the will receive value for money for the funds sent to UBOS for the census.
When the Committee tasked the officials from the Ministry of Education to explain why UBOS hasn’t returned the Shs3.9Bn to the Ministry, the officials said that the funds will be used in 2023/24 to support the roll-out of the Education Management Information System (EMIS) The EMIS will be used to collect the census data and other relevant information at a cheaper cost.
The Committee noted that delayed completion of the School Census has affected the Ministry’s ability to effectively plan for the Sector due to the lack of accurate statistics for learning parameters and may result in cost escalation of the entire census exercise due to the passage of time.
“The Accounting Officer should hastily follow up on the outstanding UBOS obligations and, further employ all available strategies to have the baseline census concluded to achieve the intended objectives. The balance of Shs3.9Bn should, be recovered from UBOS and, refunded to the Project within 3 months from date of adoption of this report,” the report read in part.
