'What should I do?' Unpredictable school fees bar many children in Africa from an education

The daily struggle to pay often unpredictable and unregulated school fees is a crushing issue for many across sub-Saharan Africa, where the lack of a few hundred dollars can determine a child’s future

The day Shalom Mirembe was sent home from school last month over unpaid tuition, her father lay dying in a hospital. Even as her mother sat by his bedside, school officials were calling and demanding payment.

For Mirembe's mother, a shoe vendor who looks after four children, it was a heartbreaking moment in the daily struggle to pay often unpredictable and unregulated school fees. Constant threats demanding payment can leave her feeling helpless. Some officials are more tolerant, but eventually they all grow tired of her pleas.

“You have to care for this one, you have to care for the other one,” Justine Nangero said, describing a delicate balancing act to keep Mirembe and the others enrolled. “I try to fight to see that I pay to all these schools.”

It is a crushing issue for many across sub-Saharan Africa, where the lack of a few hundred dollars can determine a child's future. The region has long had the world's highest dropout rates. Reasons vary, but financial pain is the biggest.

Last year, the World Bank said 54% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa rank the issue of paying school fees higher than medical bills and other expenses.

It said school fees were the biggest source of financial worry for 40% of people in Uganda, where top government-funded schools now charge nearly $700 in tuition per three-month term. That's a significant amount in this East African country where annual GDP per capita was $864 in 2023.

More than anything, it’s the unpredictable tuition hikes — for sometimes questionable reasons — that haunt parents across the country of more than 45 million people. Some critics, including Uganda's parliament speaker, have called for regulation to protect parents from exploitation.

The Equal Opportunities Commission, a government agency that tracks inequality and discrimination, released a report in September calling for punitive measures against government-supported schools that appear to set excessive fees. It warned that arbitrarily raising fees can force children to drop out.

Attendance falls from 68% in grade school to 22% in secondary school, with financial difficulty the main reason for failure to continue studies, according to new figures from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.

Uganda does have a program for universal secondary education, introduced in 2007 and similar to one for primary education, but such schools are often rundown and undesirable for many families. They are generally tuition-free, but parents must pay sometimes burdensome fees for uniforms, textbooks and other items.

When it comes to more popular, and more expensive, private schools, the government is not interested in price intervention, said Dennis Mugimba, a spokesman for the Ministry of Education.

Setting fees for private schools is “purely administrative and it is adjusted according to the business environment,” he said. But certain charges such as those including “capital development" should not be the responsibility of parents, he said.

Such private schools have mushroomed across Uganda and now make up the majority of the country's schools, addressing growing demand but also emphasizing the profitability of education as a business. That worries some experts.

“We can’t let education be treated like a market stall,” said Fagil Mandy, a former inspector of schools. Education authorities should standardize regulations to make school fees universally predictable, he said.

Routine school expenses, for both private and some top government-funded schools, can include everything from a contribution towards the purchase of a bus to the procurement of laboratory equipment.

But when the list of fees includes a ream of photocopying paper or a bag of cement from each student, questions emerge about where they end up.

The school that Mirembe attends outside the capital, Kampala, charges the equivalent of $300 per term. Its officials expect 70% of fees to be paid at the beginning of a term, but many parents fail to meet that threshold.

Some, like Nangero, send their children to school having paid nothing, counting on the mercy of officials.

But measures to track payments include gate passes that show how much is owed and when, and a student may be denied entry, said Joanita Seguya, a deputy head teacher at the school, Wampewo Ntakke Secondary.

In the school of more than 2,100 students, roughly 400 are from working-class families that routinely struggle to pay fees, according to Seguya, who said the system can seem harsh.

To accommodate some parents, the school accepts in-kind payments such as vegetables and fruit, she said.

But Nangero, whose family shares a single room, has nothing of the sort to offer. Her shoe business, long drained of cash by school fees, has collapsed. The death of her husband, whose carpentry once supplemented the family income, has increased the pain.

She said anxiety over school fees is more damaging for her children, who spend days at home whenever school officials lose patience. She's grateful that two of her sons in secondary school are now supported by an evangelical cleric — rare support made possible via contact through their religious fellowship.

The 20-year-old Mirembe, who is taking her final exams this year, was able to start the school term in September because of a bursar's sympathy, she said, but other officials were not so lenient weeks later as her father was near death.

“At least maybe I will come and pay something tomorrow," her mother recalled pleading with one official. "And she told me, ‘No, we are not going to allow your daughter to be here.’”

Mirembe arrived home hours before her father died.

Vincent Odoi, a teacher at her school, recalled the incident as unfortunate, saying administrators didn’t know of the family’s challenges. Mirembe was allowed to return days after her father’s burial, which some of her teachers attended.

Other families are not so fortunate.

One is a nearby family of seven children who dropped out of school in recent years for lack of tuition. Their jobless father, Moses Serikomawa, described the scramble in vain for school fees as “like a cancer. It cannot be treated.”

Raising a total of over $200 in school fees each term is too much trouble when the family sometimes lacks food, he said.

His oldest child, who would be in high school now, dropped out after completing secondary school last year. Now the boy is idle.

“The children still want to go back to school,” Serikomawa said. “When I look at my children, there is no joy, no joy at all.”

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