I came across a headline from the Daily Monitor reading, School Stuck with 700 Chicken raised by Students and it immediately got my face beaming with joy.
In a previous post on this blog, I stated, “The introduction of the Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) in Uganda is one of the greatest highlights the NRM regime can pride in. This is a curriculum that emphasizes what learners are expected to do rather than mainly focusing on what they are expected to know. In principle, such a curriculum is learner-centered and adaptive to the changing needs of students, teachers, and society.”
Upon learning that schools are now grappling with what to do with what the students are producing as they get skilled, I come to the realization that this is a much better problem to have.
For long our society has been blinded that for an individual to become productive, they have to first complete their studies in a University. This slowly but surely over the years begun fostering the output of useless graduates who were seemingly highly accomplished theoretically but with little or no practical skills to boast of.
Finding a post university youth today and asking them what they are ready to do will very often elicit the response, “Anything.”
For schools finding themselves in a similar predicament like Kojja Senior Secondary School, I advise that it is time to integrate these skills building activities within their setup into self sustaining enterprises.
I am sure they do not need Government clearance to engage in commercial activities of this kind. What they need to do, just in case they lack internal capacity is to take on a Business Development official who can plan for these enterprises and ensure continuity even during the holiday seasons.
One case study I would like to see happen is Busoga College Mwiri. With nearly a square mile of land that is largely lying idle, the school has the potential to undertake numerous student supported activities like Chicken, Goat, Cow, Pig and Rabbit rearing. The school could also undertake horticulture and grow various vegetables and spices. All these could be branded with the School brand like Mwiri Eggs, Mwiri Chicken, Mwiri Beef, Mwiri Milk/Yoghurt, Mwiri Cabbage, Mwiri Lettuce, Mwiri Spices etc. All these can be retailed through supermarkets and shops in the Jinja and Bugembe areas thereby offering a much needed income stream that could also directly benefit the participating students.
So, for this school claiming to be stuck with 700 chicken, and others out there in a similar boat, my advice is that they start looking at their students as productive individuals who can add value as they scale their way through the education ranks.
At a personal level, I have been very impressed by my son in Senior 1 who ever since first term holidays has exhibited a knack for getting solutions to problems at home. The minute he landed at home this December holiday, he noticed the high charcoal consumption and immediately embarked upon making charcoal briquettes. He found some damaged section of an external tap and tasked me to purchase cement in order for him to embark on the repairs (a job I was planning to pay a handyman to do). Now this is what we call skills development from an early phase in life.
Such abilities once engrained in these learners at an early stage will guarantee them to be productive even if they dropped out of school during O Level. This is a stark contrast with the approach my generation took through studies. As a result, the beneficiaries of this new curriculum are likely to discover themselves much earlier than we their parents did.
For those that see only flaws in the implementation of the new curriculum, it is time you took a step back and appreciated some of the early victories it is scoring.
James Wire
Twitter: @wirejames
Threads: @wire_james
The Wire Perspective 