KAMPALA– The National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) has urged the Government to deploy the over 68,000 teachers who graduated in teaching Kiswahili, but have remained idle due to the failure to fully operationalize the teaching of Kiswahili in both Primary and Secondary schools.
The call was made by Perpetua Arinaitwe, Senior Curriculum Specialist in Charge of Kiswahili at NCDC while appearing before Parliament’s Committee of Gender, Labour and Social Development, to give the Centre’s views on the Uganda National Kiswahili Council Bill 2023.
Arinaitwe informed the Committee that the first grade 3 teacher with Kiswahili as a teaching subject graduated in 2014, and if computed from from 2014 to 2022, there are about 68,000 teachers capable of teaching Kiswahili, but these have never practiced the knowledge they acquired because many have never been deployed.
She explained that they got some information from those examiners and those who mark Primary Teachers College Examinations that they would mark scripts totaling to 8000-10,000 student teachers.
The National Curriculum Development Centre welcomed the enactment of the Uganda National Kiswahili Council Bill 2023, saying it will be critical at fulfilling Parliament’s constitutional obligation of making Kiswahili as the second national language in Uganda.
She however decried the wastage of resources at the Ministry of Education, citing a scenario in 2014, when the Ministry of Education procured 413,456 Kiswahili Text books for all estimated 4.2 million learners for Primary 5 to 7 across the country, yet the same subject hadn’t been rolled out in these same schools where the text books were sent.
