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Secondary School Admissions Policies in Eastern Africa: Some Regional Issues

ONE OF THE MOST striking features of African countries in the first decade of Independence was the very rapid expansion of enrollments in secondary education. This was achieved by planned expansions, for the most part, with governments allocating large proportions of their scarce resources to education in the belief that an educated labor force would be created to meet the overall needs of the economy in the development effort. Despite the obvious preoccupation with economic considerations in educational planning, i.e., having a sufficiently large aggregate system and providing those being educated with suitable skills, there were broader political issues in educational planning to which administrators addressed themselves, and policies were formulated to serve political, as well as economic, aims. Despite the recent expansions, the proportion of children in school remains low, at all levels, and Africa continues to be the least educated continent. Opportunity to attend school varies considerably from one area of each country to another and from one ethnic2 and social group to another. A central political issue has, therefore, been concerned with promoting geographical and social equality of opportunity by reducing the considerable regional and social disparities in access to education which exist where education is not universal.3 This discussion considers some regional issues implicit in current procedures regulating admission to secondary education in four countries of Eastern Africa and places these procedures in their general political context. The long-term political effect of regional disparities in education in any African country is differential access to the power and elite structures, because there is, in Africa, a very close relationship between education and socio-economic status. Differential access in the past has presented problems for the present. In Uganda, for example, the predominance of Baganda in the present educated population is due to their having had better educational opportunities in the colonial period, and this has contributed to recurrent political instability since Independence. To redress the balance in such a situation, there is pressure to adopt criteria other than educational qualifications and individual merit in the allocation of elite posi-