A week after the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) released the Primary Leaving Examination (PLE) results for 2023 candidates, the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) party has urged the government to put more focus on primary school education, stating that it is the foundation of education.

This was communicated by the party Spokesperson, Faizo Muzeyi, during the party’s weekly press release on January 31, 2024, at the party headquarters at Uganda House in Kampala.

Muzeyi stated that, as UPC, they are urging the government to focus on the improvement of the quality of education and the basic importance of primary education in the country.

“Primary education offers the key foundation on which to build on further education, on which the government should put more emphasis because if it’s of good standards, then the projection of the future is more promising,” Muzeyi said.

The spokesperson also said that as UPC, it’s with great concern that they are noticing a high number of school dropouts right from primary one to primary seven, with more than one million pupils dropping out and not being able to sit for the PLE.

“Some of the main issues that cause pupils to drop out, like financial challenges, early child marriages, teenage pregnancies, and discrimination against persons with disabilities, can be prevented with the government’s intervention because it becomes a challenge for a country to cater for a youthful population with no skills as a result of school dropouts,” he added.

According to the Education Abstract 2016 for the Ministry of Education and Sports, a total of 1,798,323 new entrants were registered for primary school in 2016. At the end of the seven-year cycle of education, those who sat for PLE were only 749,254, according to UNEB statistics. This leaves a total of more than 1,000,000 school dropouts.