Changing attitudes to education in Karamoja

Look at a map of school attendance in Uganda and you notice something different about Karamoja. While the rest of the country is painted various shades of green, Uganda’s northeastern flank is crimson red. Most children do not go to school; instead, Karamojong children live the pastoralist life. But traditions are changing across the plains and escarpments, long seen as Uganda’s wildlands. And with that change comes a cultural struggle over the role of education. In the 1940s, elders in Jie county famously buried a pen to symbolise their disdain for education and modernity. The pen had been used by colonial officers to take down the names of local sons who went to fight for the British army in the second world war. Schools were seen as agents for this alien life. By the 1990s, the Jie realised they were being left behind. Local folklore had it that children who went to school were dying because of the curse of the pen and so a decision was made to have a public exhumation. But primary-school attendance is still woefully low across Karamoja - 30 percent in Moroto and Kotido, and 40 percent in Nakapiripirit against 83 percent nationwide. Those who do go to school tend to start late and leave early. Just two percent of children in Kotido, the northern most district in the region, make it to secondary school, compared with a national average of 21 percent. Girls stay on the manyatta learning to keep house and boys learn to raid cattle. As the saying goes: 'Educated men have no cows.' And in Karamoja cows are all. Raiding cattle for fees Mark Longele, a Karamojong leading the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) peace-building project in Nakapiripirit, says education is key to long-term stability and peace in the region. "The army can get rid of the guns but with south Sudan across the border they will always be readily available. Education can bring real peace because it destroys the mentality of cattle raiding. Raiding just isn’t rational," he says. Irrational maybe, but boys have been shot trying to raise their school fees through cattle raiding. Abura Ugdorilca, 14, is one of just eight girls who have stayed on at Nakapiripirit Primary School to class six. "My parents want me to get a good education because they realise it is the only way to get a good job," she says. "But many parents think that if you take a child to school she will become a 'malaaya' [Swahili for prostitute]." According to her deputy headteacher, Watuwa Nixon, the number of girls in education drops once they reach their early teens. "One day they come to school; the next they are gone – married at 14 or 15 never to return," says Watuwa. He finds his workload far greater in Karamoja than in previous postings because he constantly has to persuade children and their parents of the merit of education. "Children back home in Mbale [in eastern Uganda] just run for education but here you have to beg and plead for them to come. "In the evening I walk around the villages and speak to the parents. They ask for money for chewing tobacco," he says, smiling, "and I give it to them out of my teacher’s salary because I know that I have to get them on my side or we are lost." The United Nations World Food Programme provides those in school with oil and maize flour, and Watuwa says many parents will make sure their children attend the bare minimum required to qualify. "When there is no food from the WFP they go back to the villages," he says. Hardly surprising in an area where many are reliant on food aid for survival. "The Karamojongs’ livelihood needs are relatively short term but the benefits of education are relatively long term," says Jeremy England, regional director for the UN children’s fund (Unicef). "The problem here isn’t the buildings - we can teach under a tree - but work has to be done to make sure education is flexible enough for the Karamojong working day and relevant to their lifestyle." Classes under tress

Increasingly children are being taught under trees and at suitable hours of the day by community tutors working for Alternative Basic Education for Karamojong (ABEK). The Save the Children scheme makes education relevant to the pastoralist lifestyle: basic animal husbandry, health and sanitation rather than geography, physics and foreign languages. Aleper Loram, Nakapiripirit’s district inspector of schools, says ABEK has done wonders for changing parental attitudes. "After a little bit of ABEK we find that rather than seeing education as a threat the father and mother wave their children off to school." He wants to see ABEK’s lessons adopted by mainstream education. "A child with an education cannot live like a Karamojong. Without work he finds himself stranded between two cultures. The national curriculum says nothing about the lives they lead and that’s why parents are reluctant to send their children to school. The curriculum needs to change to include aspects of Karamojong life and not [alienate] them from their culture," Loram says. At the moment just 30 percent of teachers in Karamoja are from the region because local students cannot get the grades necessary to qualify for teacher training college. Loram wants to see affirmative action allowing Karamojong with lower grades entry to college. He also wants subjects relevant to the pastoralist lifestyle to be examinable and nationally recognised. Others believe pastoralist exceptionalism does the Karamojong no favours, seeing support for nomadic pastoralism when the population is booming as a recipe for increased cattle rustling and insecurity. Robert Lochap who works for the UN Development Programme and is himself a Karamojong, says boarding school should be compulsory. "They are building schools everywhere but attendances are very low," he says. "All children of a certain age should go to boarding school so that we can catch children before they grow up into cattle-raiding. At the moment we are killing ourselves with it." One way of boosting education’s appeal is to ensure there are jobs at the end of it. "Villagers where I grew up saw education as a threat," says the IRC’s Mark Longele, "but now they see me going back to my family in a car, with presents, and they think ‘my children could be like that’."