The call emanates from a 2017 study titled ASSESSMENT OF THE EXISTING ACCOUNTABILITY MEASURES AT THE NATIONAL AND SUB NATIONAL LEVELS IN UGANDA conducted by the Africa Freedom of Information Center which revealed that there was a general lack of information by communities on the way public schools in the localities are run. This, it was revealed, it had led to mismanagement of many public schools with the communities not empowered to ask the right questions. “We recommend that government should urgently implement the Information Access Act. By doing that, it will ensure that every citizen accesses information on what government is doing in this particular school. And by having that, then these people can question if the teacher has not attended school, the parents will know from their pupils that today the teacher did not come. So that they can ask the head teacher why did the teacher not come?”

The study was conducted in 15 districts of Eastern and Northern Uganda. It was also discovered that well as public expenditure has been rising yearly over the past five years, services provided have remained poor. Although most public schools now have better buildings and more teachers, they still perform worse than private schools that lack the same facilities. “Payment of teachers in private schools is unpredictable and that sometimes it comes late; these are in private school. So we are wondering how come these very schools where we have these challenges they perform better than public schools where the pay is higher compared to private, it is predictable and also regular that even when the schools are on holiday, the teachers get their monthly salaries.”

The study shows that most members of school committees are not trained on what to do and there is no effective monitoring by the district officials. “In a number of schools, it was doubted whether this function is working very well and therefore we ask for copies of inspection reports. Now this information was not provided by the districts and we assume also that these local structures; the school management committees never get reports of inspectors because when an inspector comes once in six months in one year. At least if the school management committee is functional and they get copies of what the inspector has found and therefore they should follow it up, it would make a difference. But if they have no reports then it becomes a problem.” The reports call for strengthening the linkage between schools’ inspectors and the community. It also calls for strengthening the roles of government’s accountability agencies including PPDA, Inspectorate of Government and the Auditor General in the running of public schools.