Opinion: Uganda’s schooling system doesn’t politically empower young people

A limited understanding of how Uganda's political system works is hampering young people in the country, but the education sector alone is not the magic bullet for democratisation, economic growth or poverty alleviation, says Dr Simone Datzberger (UCL Institute of Education). More than 20 years ago, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development stated that: "The lack of education stops a great majority of Africans from being citizens in their own right." However, in the two following decades, there have been very mixed results on how education enhances political empowerment in sub-Saharan Africa. Some researchers found that in Kenya civic education programmes had positive effects on political participation and engagement. By contrast, other scholars argued that higher levels of education did not increase people's propensity to pursue "easy" forms of political participation, such as voting in the case of Mali. One country that is struggling with democracy is Uganda. The country's political environment remains severely restricted under the regime of long-ruling President Yoweri Museveni. In 2019 Freedom House - an independent watchdog organisation dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world - downgraded Uganda from partly free to not free.