Karamoja's Enduring Battle to Educate

Achieving Millennium Development Goal on Education (MDG2) for Karamoja remains a wild dream, less than three years to 2015.
MDG2 states: “Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling”.
For Karamoja, if MDG objective two was: “to ensure that by 2015, parents everywhere will know the importance of education”, it would have good chances of being achieved by 2015.
With a static illiteracy rate of 88-90%, Karamoja’s 2015 goals are a distant dream.
Not that government and other development partners have not made their attempts, but that the underlying issues are complex wherein trial and error approaches are commonplace.
Karamoja continues to have the most children out of school in Uganda, with the few in school dropping out before completion of primary school.
During the ‘Go Back to School’ campaign in Kotido in January 2012, the Kotido District Education Officer, Ambrose Lutuke disclosed that out of 17,000 pupils who had enrolled in primary school in his district in the beginning of 2011, only 10,000 completed the year, representing an annual dropout rate of 41%.
Efforts towards achieving success in education in Karamoja come face to face with a number of hindrances including poverty, poor infrastructure, nomadism, economic activities that occupy children of school going age and a culture that does not encourage girl-child education.
All these could be issues of the past.
There is a heightened resolve by the Karimojong to take their children to school, amidst all these challenges. Even more, the ‘enlightened’ are encouraging others to do so.
The ‘Go Back to School’ campaign of January/February 2012 was one such campaign where people showed solidarity and came out on the streets to support the campaign supported by development agencies including the United Nations International Children Education Fund (UNICEF). Together with local leaders, they called upon the rest of the population to send their children to school and keep them there until completion.
Participants at this year’s International Women’s Day celebrations at Nakapiripirit District took the chance to campaign for education, showcasing the challenges and the benefits of achievement.
And the struggle to shoot down the high illiteracy rates seems to have become an issue of daily struggle amongst the Karimojong. This is a battle the world has to continue supporting.

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