BEST SCHOOLS UGANDA (PRIMARY, SECONDARY AND UNIVERSITY)

Under the UBC Best Brands Uganda Platform, the first advertising campaign has been dedicated to the education sector. UBC’s choice has been guided by Uganda’s regionally accepted brand as a desired location for educating children and youths. The “Best Schools Uganda” brand has thankfully got the task of consolidating rather than introducing Uganda as a “Best Schools” country. This deserves priority before the sectors of health, industry, agriculture which are just as good but have received little publicity due to the smaller numbers that have invested in them compared to education which serves a 10 million+ user population. To realize early results in national branding, Ugandans need a concerted education sector marketing effort, to appreciate and demonstrate that Uganda has a competitive advantage as a country in which to:

• Invest infrastructure development capital for earning secure returns with the support of banks who have proven the sector to be financially resilient;
• Start teaching career opportunities as a strong starting point in a global career journey.
• Educate one's children to equip them for today’s global competitive labor market.
• Build a strong moral foundation where faith, clan and parental ethical foundation are largely intact.

UGANDA’S EDUCATIONAL PERFORMANCE DRIVEN BY A HISTORICAL ECOSYSTEM OF FACTORS.

On the surface, citizens and investors in the sector believe that Uganda’s advantage lies in the strict academic discipline that is enforced and the anticipation of good grades as value for the parents’ fees payments. Uganda’s competitive advantage is based on various cultural and historical factors as follows:

a) The lifelong educational value of Uganda’s cultural and natural diversity.

The long-established measure of educational attainment is Albert Binet’s (1904) Intelligence Quotient (IQ) theory, which measures intelligence using a mental age and biological age formula to determine intelligence levels (verywellmind.com). IQ can be simplified as a person’s ability to absorb and apply large amounts of complex knowledge in making life’s decisions. A diverse and challenging natural environment where from birth a child is required to absorb and use numerous complex facts for safety and happiness will enhance intelligence development.

Uganda’s biodiversity as a country located in the globally acclaimed Albertine Valley, is an extraordinary stimulus to learning upon which Uganda has built and can expand its educational brand. It is on the basis of Uganda’s unique location that Sir Churchill who had travelled the world declared Uganda unequalled in the following terms,

“...For magnificence, variety of form and color, a profusion of brilliant life, bird, insect, reptile, beast…for vast scale, Uganda is truly the Pearl of Africa…. The scenery is different, the vegetation is different, the climate is different and, most of all, the people are different from anything elsewhere to be seen in the whole range of Africa” (Churchill: My Africa Journey: 1906)

b) Examples of early childhood work and play activities that stretch memory and build intelligence.

Several Ugandan childhood learning processes will help illustrate how stimulating Uganda’s culture and nature are in intelligence formation. A child shares in the family chores as early as it can walk, especially by safely passing on household utensils to a parent or older sibling who is in the middle of a high concentration task.

Take an example educational content of a man or woman mingling millet bread on a fire who sends a 3-year-old child to get a table basket for serving it. Such a child has through hearing and observation, effortlessly watched the millet cycle and learned by age three that:

• Millet is harvested in one type of large basket, Oruteete (has 1-inch gaps between vines to allow air circulation and prevent rot);
• It is carried in a different smaller size basket in and out of the store for drying, ekitukuru (no gaps between vines so that seeds rubbing off the heads can be retained.)
• The millet heads are winnowed and dried on a different basket type, entaara (flat so as to capture sunshine on all heads);
• It is milled on a stone onto a different basket, orugari (flat but small enough to partly fit under the millstone so as to harvest the flour).
• Millet flour is then taken from the millstone in a different basket, entemere (wide enough for flour to be poured in safely off the flat basket yet raised to prevent wind from blowing the flour away).
• The surplus long-term storage dry millet heads are stored in a granary which is like a gigantic basket.
• The millet bread process involves an addition lineup for wooden utensils for cleaning it, stone mills for grinding it, and grass for smoking it if there is insufficient sunshine.
• All the production activities have safety and ethical guidelines on every small step which sound superstitious but are actually loaded with virtues.

From one simple activity of which there could be 20 chores a day, a 3-5-year-old child learns thousands of vocabularies, interwoven by many safety, quality, and ethical concepts.

Even in today’s urbanized Uganda, only a small number of students have lost touch with this amazing educational culture because most Ugandan parents build and frequently visit country homes to ensure that children watch and participate in traditional life alongside their rural relatives.

Moving on from culture to nature or even zoological and botanical concepts, a Ugandan child informally stretches its memory further with a working knowledge of:

• Matoke varieties.
• Bean seed varieties.
• Goat colors.
• Cow colors.
• Snake categories, varieties, and behavior.
• Wild fruit varieties.
• Grown fruit varieties.
• Parents' parental lineage on maternal and paternal sides.
• Cousins on paternal and maternal sides.
• At least 20 first aid herbs for most ailments and how to administer them.

Within each of the above information “mental wallets”, can be derived an extraordinary vocabulary accompanied by the items’ economic functions. For the purpose of exploring the foundations of Uganda’s educational brand it is agreeable that her natural and cultural diversity almost awards a child a degree before he or she enters a classroom. Parents from communities with less natural and cultural diversity will often be motivated by the internal competition that Ugandan children offer to their kids but the actual catalyst is the biodiversity which UBC considers to deserve greater visibility under the Best Schools advertising campaign.

c) Uganda’s highly motivational educational Culture.

Discussions with people from all continents around children’s education reveal that even children that Ugandan teachers and parents consider slow to learn, are deemed to be highly motivated by people from other regions of the world. The following are observations that feature in Ugandans convictions of all ages:

• A person who spends family resources and does not stay in school long enough to secure a professional livelihood but rather reverts to parent’s remaining resources is considered a failure.
• A respectable Ugandan traditionally pursues education at all costs and gives a comfortable lifestyle to parents to compensate for the sacrifices made to educate him or her.
• Illiteracy is abominable as such a person cannot tell what has been written for him in an important agreement.
• Education should take a person to places that his or her parents have not been to.

All in all, whether motivated by high population growth which renders agrarian lifestyles untenable, or by Uganda’s a turbulent political past where the well-educated refugees established livelihoods abroad, Ugandan society has evolved a “no turning back” culture once they enter their educational journey. This aggressive academic culture on the basis of which low youth motivation cultures seek places in Ugandan schools, is part of Uganda’s Best Schools brand that our country has to offer.

d) Ethnic diversity and global adaptability

The world Atlas places Uganda in 4th position among the most ethnically diverse countries of the world. (www.worldatlas.com) Getting to the specifics people groups, the third schedule of Uganda’s 1995 constitution lists a total of 56 indigenous persons who possess distinctive ethnic attributes in terms of ancestry, location and social characteristics. This number is as of 1926, which means that it has now increased to hundreds. Uganda has the third highest refugee population as a percentage of the citizens with more than 1.5 million people from other countries, many of whom get naturalized. Uganda’s ethnic diversity is further enhanced by incoming spouses and career migrants including those who study in Uganda and opt to become citizens.

The resulting social attribute is widespread ethnic co-existence which prepares people well for adaptability in foreign lands. In traveling to other parts of the world, one encounters ethnic groups that even create entire towns so as to guard their ethnic identity. In locations of global cities, one finds Thai Town, China Town, Mexican Town all which reflect their indigenous architecture, dress and food that sustain ethnic identity. Ugandans on the other hand blend into other cultures and have as best friends, the people in the host countries. It can therefore be affirmed of Uganda that it is a perfect location for raising children and youth as the diverse culture makes them adaptable globally. Among the specific benefits of studying in an ethnically diverse community are the following:

• Multilingual and multi-dialect capabilities.
• Productive Multiracial integration.
• Skill and technology transfer and integration from all ethnic groups.
• Leadership networking for long-term regional integration.

A fully supported sector with diverse curricula for an empowered workforce.

UBC has a lot more evidence in support of Uganda as a Best Schools destination, but of foremost importance, the local and regional consumers need to appreciate the Ministries of Education, Gender and others who have streamlined diverse qualification bodies to ensure diverse youth talent inclusion such as:

• The Uganda National Examinations Board
• The Uganda Business and Technical Examinations Board
• The Directorate of Industrial Training Program.
• The Uganda Skilling program.
• The Post Primary Technical Educational Program.
• The Community Polytechnical Schools program
• The National Council for Higher Education.

Uganda’s empowering educational infrastructure has created an education culture that accommodates International Curricular, home schooling, private candidates, and specialized Institutes that allow youths and adults to penetrates new professional fields like nursing, accounting, media ICT tourism all designed to help youths and find their places in the labor market.

In fulfillment of its mandate to educate and guide, UBC has started the Best Schools Uganda taken a step ahead of the traditional production of adverts as given by schools to a more empowering approach where UBC has gathered information from the global market regarding what it takes to offer a goods school to the public.

From the schools that participate in the Best Schools campaign, adverts will be highlighting their investments and achievements in the following quality assurance outcomes or results for which UBC will provide a public relations manual: Academic performance, Teaching facilities, Campus infrastructure. Parental involvement; student innovations, great food culture, co-curricular facilities, Occupational safety, Affordability and value for money, Preventive and emergency health plans, Staff capacity development. UBC welcomes the education sector entrepreneurs to participate in the Best Schools campaign so as to stand out locally and raise Uganda’s brand in the Est African region.