Africa-Press – Uganda. The experts in early childhood development programmes have blamed the high school dropout rate in primary schools to lack of pre-primary education.
Prof Godfrey Ejuu, the early childhood development lecturer, Kyambogo University said the high dropout rate in primary schools is because the children are unprepared to be in schools.
According to him, being in school is a behavior that one must learn, on how to do things which are leant in the pre-primary education but when it’s not done, the children will go to school although won’t continue.
“We learn from research that when people are prepared early, they lay a foundation to get skills which they use as adults because they have a window of opportunity for development of those skills before the age of five years,” Mr Ejuu said during the conference on inclusion of Home-based Early Learning Project (iHELP) at Kyambogo University on Wednesday.
According to him, skills to do with creativity, reasoning, thinking and problem solving develop in early years.
He asked the government to invest in pre-primary education, arguing that lack of it, leads to wastage of resources as most children are enrolled in primary one and drop out by the end of primary five especially in rural areas.
Dr Rose Atieno, the co-investigator for Project in Kenya said that Kenya already has Pre-primary one and two and that Uganda is more in need for the programme.
“We are interested more on building children, making children ready by using the play oriented approach in learning. Children love playing and we use that to introduce them to pre-reading and writing,” Ms Atieno said.
Dr Samson Mhizha, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe noted that his country is working towards sustaining these centres through providing seed capital to parents so that they can do income generating projects to sustain the centres in their communities.
“Kyambogo University is not going to remain a donor, we are trying to train the people in marginalised areas to learn to invest in the learning of their own children,” Mr Mhizha said.
Data from the Ministry of Education shows that of the 1,880,000 learners who joined Primary One in 2016, only 832,659 completed Primary Seven. This means that 1,047,341 learners dropped out along the way.
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