Abstract:

It is three years and seven months since governments officially took on the 17 SDGs after their adoption by the world leaders in September 2015. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), otherwise known as the Global Goals or Agenda 2030, are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity. Of the 17 goals, this paper specifically pays attention to SDG 4, whose key objective is to redefine basic education provision globally to focus on both quality and inclusivity as foundational pillars for achieving sustainable development. This paper embraces a comparative analysis of learning outcomes among the refugee and non-refugee communities in Arua, Adjumani, Yumbe and Isingiro districts of Uganda. The paper draws from an analysis of data of Uwezo - an initiative that tracks learning outcomes of children aged 6-16 across East Africa (Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania). In Uganda, a large-scale assessment of learning outcomes has been undertaken since 2011 at the household level across 80 districts in the country using two primary literacy and numeracy tasks. Since then, the Uwezo methodology has focused on Uganda’s normal context, leaving behind the refugee context which is associated with a significant number of refugees. In this paper, a cross-sectional analysis of the 2017 Uwezo Uganda dataset is undertaken to establish learning outcomes among refugee and host communities at the sub-national or district level. From the analysis, findings show that although levels of learning remain poor across refugee and non-refugee contexts, in some cases, for example where refugee children whose household had lived in Uganda for more than a year were more likely to be able to read and comprehend, and divide than their counterparts whose households had just settled in Uganda and hence refugee communities perform better than the host communities. This, therefore, indicates some challenges of delivering services and ensuring quality learning that are specific to refugee contexts and others that are the same for refugee and non-refugee pupils and their teachers.

Keywords:

Learning outcomes, SDG 4, refugee and non-refugee contexts, Uwezo assessment, Uwezo methodology.