UWEZO – UGANDA

Significant investment has been made to recruit teachers, build classrooms and improve school infrastructure, however: the unprecedented growth of schools, teachers and enrollment has not been matched by improvements in quality Schools across East Africa today are characterized by insufficient and poorly trained, under motivated teachers, overcrowded classrooms and a lack of adequate teaching/learning materials.

Uwezo’s own findings demonstrate that vast majority of children in school are not able to perform at the required level, and too many complete primary schooling without basic competencies in reading and arithmetic

2. NUMEROUS ASSESSMENTS HAVE BEEN UNDERTAKEN, BUT HAVE HAD LITTLE IMPACT

Before the introduction of Uwezo, there were at least three major regional and national learning assessments in East Africa

These assessments were all conceived as higher-end policy related designed primarily to provide information for policymaking, with limited value in East Africa where ‘research-policy-implementation’ linkages are not effective

There is little evidence to show that these studies have helped trigger greater policy clarity or change, and the overly technical nature of these assessments may have made the findings inaccessible to the very audience they had targeted

3. NEW COMMUNICATION CHANNELS ARE INCREASINGLY POWERFUL FOR CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS 

Citizen engagement is usually understood to be organized through civil society organizations (CSOs), which have often faced significant challenges in areas of integrity, quality leadership, internal governance and sustainability

Their ability to reach and connect with citizens and enable citizen organizing have been especially weak, limiting their political resonance and legitimacy

There is a growing need for locally-driven, broad based accountability in bringing about and sustaining better service delivery, with citizens able to demand better responsiveness and accountability

Communication channels are growing rapidly and thriving in East Africa. The growth of media has also created unprecedented space for access to differing viewpoints and public debate; the growth of cell phones has dramatically altered communication possibilities in both rural and urban contexts; and through the growth of vernacular radio citizens are both better informed and have greater space for direct voice and engagement

Theory of change

Uwezo has been established on the basis that we need more than top-down reform– we need citizen involvement and oversight. Uwezo believes that informed and motivated citizens are the most powerful agents of sustainable change. We view citizen agency as both a goal in itself and an effective means to improve service delivery and public resource management. The organizational ‘Theory of Change’ informs and underpins everything we do at Uwezo, centering citizen agency in building public pressure that will then trigger actions to improve learning and reaction from policy makers.  There are four important stages to our theory of change.

STAGE 1: ANNUAL ASSESSMENTS OF COUNTRYWIDE LEARNING:

Uwezo establishes evidence by assessing literacy and numeracy levels for children aged 6-16 years using a large, country-wide household based sample. Three annual rounds of the Uwezo assessment have already been successfully undertaken in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

STAGE 2: COMMUNICATE FINDINGS WIDELY AND FOSTER BROAD PUBLIC DEBATE:

Building a solid evidence base is necessary, but usually insufficient for changes in policy and practice. Uwezo believes that concerned actors – whether parents or politicians, teachers or technocrats – will do the right thing when they are compelled to do so or have a clear incentive to act. Uwezo therefore places great emphasis on communication of findings; in fostering informed public understanding and debate about the situation and what can be done about it.

STAGE 3: SHIFT FROM SCHOOLING INPUTS TO LEARNING OUTCOMES:

We anticipate that over time, the communication of actual literacy and numeracy levels will lead to a realization among the public and policymakers that schooling is not enabling children to gain skills, which in turn will lead to a greater concern with how children can learn. We envisage this happening at two levels:

• At the community level

Having become aware of the crisis, engaged citizens (parents, children, local leaders and activists) will take concrete steps to improve learning, either through private actions (e.g. pay more attention to homework, follow up with a teacher, pay for a tutor, change schools) or mount collective action. We do not expect all people reached to act, in most cases actions start with a few, courageous outliers first and then start to catch on.

• At the district and national levels

Convinced by the evidence presented or the public pressure from below or both, key actors will begin to change (e.g. through sustained coverage in the media, constituency members demand answers). Here Uwezo will encourage key actors to examine the evidence before undertaking a particular course of action, and seek ways to identify the policy practices that have the greatest effect.

STAGE 4: LEARN, MONITOR AND EVALUATE:

Flowing through Uwezo’s different stages and forms of work is an emphasis on learning, and on monitoring and evaluation.  Uwezo’s annual cycle of planning, assessment, analysis and communication provides an opportunity to learn and make adjustments each year. Uwezo acknowledges that the flow of actions from stage to stage is neither entirely predictable nor linear: it is premised on sensitive recognition and analysis of, and responsiveness to, the forms of citizen action and policy responses that are taking place.