Schools are incurring huge overheads in buses, so why not feed our children milk?

By Ben Ssebuguzi

It is disheartening to learn that Ugandan milk company, Brookside has laid off 70% of its workforce because of Kenya’s refusal to grant us export permits,  yet 75% of its market is in Kenya.

This is a big weakness if we don’t build the capacity to consume our own products to reduce over-dependency on foreign markets. What befell our milk school feeding program? Did it hit a snag because of the politicisation of issues? Feeding on milk guarantees our children’s health in terms of the resilience of their bodies but also boosts their brains in terms of creativity. This also reduces medical expenses when the child is always sickly.

According to my research, our schools are busy grappling with unnecessary expenses due to the bandwagon effect. They are spending money to maintain the high expenses of running BUSES.

An average bus costs $290,000 which they are able to nag parents to contribute. But you can’t mobilise Ugx 10,000 per term for a daily cup of milk for our school children. The labour expenses of a bus alone are mind-boggling estimated to be up to $1500 per bus, and the average cost of operating a bus is about $65 per hr, which puts unnecessary pressure on the limited resources of the school.

Modern businesses are using the model of outsourcing, why can’t school proprietors adopt this model since BUSES are not core businesses? Kindly it would be more prudent to focus on the education needs and health of learners by feeding them a good diet which determines the good future of our learners than investing in buses which you use seldom, probably once a month when there are school trips or seminars.

In conclusion, Uganda’s GDP and economic growth cannot be increasing when our consumer class is not increasing to support our local industry. Both China and India have 1.4b people and each is adding around 30m people to their consuming class. Personally, I would be impressed when my children inform me that they drank milk at school.

In the same vein, Uganda’s Real GDP grew an estimated 6.3% in 2022, and more than 5.6% in 2021, this should provide an opportunity to make deliberate efforts in promoting local consumption in order to support our industry.
By drinking milk we shall be preparing a better innovative workforce for the future.

The author is the Head of Research at the Office of the National Chairman (ONC) in Kyambogo.