Luweero District Fails to Conduct USE Headcount

The Ministry of Education and Luweero district have been faulted by the Auditor General for releasing capitation grants to schools under Universal Secondary Education-USE programme without conducting physical headcount of students.

Guideline 8.2 (iv) of the Ministry of Education and Sports policy guideline for participating government-aided secondary schools under universal secondary education, 2012 requires the district to participate in ascertaining the number of beneficiaries of the Universal Secondary Education (USE) programme as a determinant of the amount to be released to a school.

But the Auditor General Report for the year 2018 reveals that the government released funds without headcount of students in Luweero schools as required by the guidelines.

The Auditor General John Muwanga observed that the amount of capitation grant released to each school was based on availability of funds which is risky because more funds than required can be released. 

He said that accounting officers explained that amount of capitation accrued to each school was determined by applying an annual growth rate to compute the projected enrollment which is also risky.

He added the schools may get under or over funded which may lead to failure to meet the high costs of post-primary education and or misappropriation of resources respectively.

He has since advised the Ministry of Education and Luweero district education department to conduct the headcount before releasing money to the schools.

Paul Mukungu the Director of New Life Secondary School, a private school under USE Programme says that although no headcount was done, they provided the list of enrollment of learners to the district.

Mukungu, however, noted that failure to conduct headcount also affects the schools because they are underfunded and this affects acquisition of resources to run them.

Florence Bbosa the Luweero District Education Officer declined to comment saying she was busy and the Minister for Higher Education John Chrysostom Muyingo was unavailable.

However, the Chief Administrative Officer Godfrey Kuruhiira replied to AG’s query indicating that the education department had plans to carry out the headcount in the coming academic years.

Capitation grants are paid on the basis of the number of students enrolled in a school and the level of education.

 In the UPE program, on top of an annual threshold of 1,350,000 shillings, each school is entitled to a variable of 10,000 shillings per pupil annually and in the USE program, the variable payment per student is dependent upon the level of education and the type of institution (private or Government owned).

In 2017/18 the schools under Universal Primary Education programme in Luweero received 1.1 billion shillings for enrollment of 113,272 pupils.

The AG’s report also indicated that the secondary schools received 2.9 billion shillings for 22,979 students enrolled in Universal Secondary Education programme.

However, the schools reported under funding by a significant variance of 645 million shillings.