Communities lobby for new classroom block for St. Anthony Bukasa

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Following the Village Budget Club (VBC) monitoring exercise in March 2012, the VBCs in Wakiso discovered that the pupils of St Anthony Bukasa New Model School Primary 1 and Primary 4 pupils were sharing the same class room. This was a menace to the teachers and the concentration levels for these children were very low.  The Village Budget Club members on finding out this situation went ahead to share with the bigger community and in this meeting it was revealed that because of this situation, many children had left school simply because their parents had lost trust and confidence in the capacity of the school to provide quality education to their children and by the time of the VBC monitoring the school had a population of 40 only pupils. 12 pupils mobilized and they got 42
The community agreed to present this matter to the district leaders and lobby them to support for government towards this school. An interface meeting was held, the VBCs and the community met duty bearers including the Chief Administrative Office, the District Planner, the Community Development Officer and the District Education Officer all of Wakiso District. A report on findings at the school and recommendations from the community was presented to this team. After this meeting, the District Planner and the CAO lobbied the Ministry of Education and later the school benefited from government support under the government School Emergency Facility Fund. With this support, St. Anthony received two classrooms blocks, a toilet and 80 desks. The other beneficiary school for this community initiative was St. Aloysius School which also received Staff quarters.
The new classroom block at St. Anthony Bukasa was commissioned earlier in 2013 the school staff, the district duty bearers and community members were all present to celebrate this achievement. In his remarks on this day, the DEO for Wakiso on behalf of the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Education thanked FOWODE for bringing to their attention the critical needs of this school. He confessed that due to ineffectiveness of the schools inspections unit very few schools are inspected and as such it’s hard to get the facts on ground and St. Anthony was among the government schools that were suffering. According to him government duty fully released funds for this school without monitoring its performance. He urged the community members to continue complementing government work through monitoring service delivery which in turn makes government to be keener on how it executes its budget.

As is the case with other VBCs that FOWODE facilitates in 14 other districts, this is a perfect example of how we have witnessed local government officials making amendments to district budgets in order to effectively address community concerns. Since 2010, FOWODE has built the capacity of grassroots communities to engage in monitoring implementation of government programs within their communities. Through meaningful dialogues with duty bearers, grassroots communities have increasingly been recognized as key stakeholders and advisors on key governance and accountability aspects.

by Abdul Muyimbwa, Field Officer, Wakiso District

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