Higher education is a fundamental building block to ensure the maintenance and growth of skilled labour and is essential in the country’s economic prosperity and growth. Despite being a fundamental block in shaping future human recourses, higher education is the most expensive to fund.
Education is part of the government strategies to improve equality of opportunity & deliver good outcomes, especially for those students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The government of Uganda has recently been financing student’s higher education through state house scholarships into public universities based on outstanding class performance using number of points scored. It was noted that this system had yielded very little impact leaving a lot to be desired for students to access higher education due to higher costs involved where many students fail to join universities or fail to complete programs of study due to failure to pay tuition fees.
It’s well known that higher points are always scored in “good schools”, where the poor can’t afford. Due to relatively poor academic performance in most rural based schools, points obtained couldn’t enable such students access higher education with the recently only available point based option hence seeding a lot knowledge, opportunities and income disparities in different regions of the country leaving students (citizens) not only poor but with humiliation, distress, mental anguish and psychological torture
With the introduction of Universal Primary and Secondary Education, the number of applicants for higher education increased coupled with higher dropouts due to failure to pay tuition hence the introduction of student’s loans scheme
Public sector finance is key to unlocking the poverty trap which has affected several generations, and the delivery of higher-level skills associated with higher education is made possible partly through student’s loans
Uganda implemented her student’s loans scheme in 2014, using its Higher Education Students Financing Act of 2014, giving students loans to study programs of National importance in light of Economic development including but not limited to Bachelors of clinical Medicine & Community Health with an aim of paying back the money after gainful employment.
Bachelors of clinical medicine and community health is an undergraduate medical dual degree offered in East Africa, as well as other middle and high income countries such as Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Africa, Nigeria, USA, Malaysia, UK, & China.
Like any other graduate, after school life is spent looking for employment to make ends meet, but this time round coupled with repayment of the government loans. For this specific group of graduates, there is neither public nor private employment due to lack of schemes of service and scope of practice with no known category in public service and never job adverts seeking to recruit medical clinical officers at bachelors level
These graduates are not spared when their loans grace period expires thus are expected to pay back like any other well established program. Thank you for the financial support but kindly note that positions for medical clinical officers at bachelor’s level are never advertised anywhere
Sadly, loan scheme recovery department has continued exacerbating their frustrations by sending all sorts of monthly demand notice coupled with calls to the unemployed loonees
We are afraid the poor graduates from humble backgrounds with added huge loans plus interests are left with no option but rather scum to all sort frustrations, agony & mental disorders. While other states are languisng for shortage of medical human resource, Uganda is already having virgin, completely untapped medical human resource financed by the very government, surprisingly with unmet doctor patient ratio. Hence there is a need for the Government of Uganda, Non Government organizations & the East African Community to reconsider this redundant medical work force with a government obligation to fulfill
The author is; Kasadha Nasser, loan schemer, graduate of bachelors of clinical medicine & community health
Do you have a story or an opinion to share? Email us on: [email protected] Or join the Daily Express WhatsApp channel for all the latest news and trends or join the Telegram Channel for the latest updates.
