The Executive Director ToroDev, Johnson Baguma Kumaraki has promised to further strengthen partnership with Kyegegwa Town Council Local Government and the local communities to strengthen education performance through support to increased monitoring and community sensitization on the importance of education among others.
Mr. Johnstone also promised to support more community engagements with both political and technical leaders in the education sector through holding regular accountability meetings/workshops and participation on the live radio discussions. This was revealed during a stakeholders education conference held in Kyegegwa Town Council held on 30th July, 2014.
ToroDev has been supporting Kyegegwa district local government in the use of appropriate ICT tools like local FM radios to give accountability to the local citizens for improved service delivery. Many local citizens in the district have also been trained to use appropriate ICT tools to monitor service delivery and participate in government planning and budgeting processes.
Other areas of support identified to uplift the performance of the education sector in the district were organizing annual education review meetings, lobbying for improved budgetary allocations to education sector by both local and central government leaders, regular capacity building trainings to school management committees, teachers and other education stakeholders.
Participants discussing during the conference
The education conference organized by Kyegegwa Local Government in partnership with ToroDev and other civil society organizations like KRC, RIDE-Africa and RICNET among others also identified the critical barriers to education performance in Kyegegwa Town Council as poor attitude of the community towards education, failure to provide children with school lunch, limited career guidance and counseling of children.
Other critical barriers to improved education performance in Kyegegwa Town Council identified were failure to promote physical education, declining morality in the community leading to high levels of indiscipline and other policy challenges like high pupil to teacher ratio, poor teacher’s welfare, poor infrastructure among others.
This activity was supported by NED, SIDA/CIPESA on a project aimed at using appropriate ICT tools to improve service delivery and accountability in the Rwenzori Region, Western Uganda.