Promoting Real Healthy Families: Home Economics

Complexities on diversity in languages is a challenge to the acquisition of quality education.

A research that Kole Intellectual Forum is exploring into to find how these issues of languistic diversities can be accommodated to bring about a clear and unquestionable positive results in the quality of education in Uganda, particularly in Kole District

Kole Intellectual Forum is mainly focused on the issue of using mother tongue / local language as a medium of instruction and how this relates to learning outcomes. Following the background that, in Uganda, there is an existing language policy, which requires the use of pupils' mother tongues or a common area language as a medium of instruction from Primary 1 to Primary 3. 

The team of the organization argued that while the policy is well-intentioned, it is faced with a number of challenges in practice and has not yet translated into desirable learning outcomes. For example, due to the linguistic diversity of Uganda even within smaller geographical areas, choosing to use one local language as a medium of instruction in one given village may exclude some learners who do not speak the language, thus, affecting their learning.

In all this, the team noted teachers to be a key factor, yet they have hardly been well-supported to implement the language policy. A recent spotlight study by the organization reported on basic education completion and foundational learning in Uganda highlighted a scarcity of curriculum documents and teacher guides. Where these existed, they were all in English, inserting more pressure on the teachers to be language interpreters while delivering the curriculum (Nakabugo et al 2024).

In her final submission, Kole Intellectual Forum argued that, improving children’s learning outcomes requires much more than simply having in place a language in education policy that requires the use of local language as a medium of instruction. Other factors, such as support to teachers, availability of resources, the support to learners and parental and community awareness of the value of the policy need to be considered.