By Sabir Musa

Yumbe

Education stakeholders in Yumbe District have formed an initiative dubbed Aringa Education Fund, focused on supporting education sector and improving performance of learners. This follows a recent resolution made by Aringa Kingdom resulting from challenges the education sector is facing.

The Kingdom Prime Minister, Lemeriga Fadhil informs that this initiative is aimed at closing gaps in the sector through different interventions. He said, “accessing facilities like scholarships and bursaries, resources to better education infrastructure amongst Aringa people” are the main purpose of this initiative which is expected “to encourage youths (both male and female) to embrace education, even including parents”.


Lemeriga Fadhil (courtesy Photo from Twitter)

By the time of compiling this report, 10 scholarships were already secured through the initiative from Ajai Africa Foundation to support 10 students in O-Level next year.

Aringa Education Fund Treasurer, Naima Anguko who doubles as the Chairperson for Yumbe District Head Teachers Association confirms the scholarships, stating that more support is required to achieve objectives of this initiative. “Personally I got impressed and started my contributions immediately. We have secured scholarships especially from universities and some individuals but we felt that these may not be enough, that’s why we still want to add more” she said.

Yumbe District Education Officer, Rasul Luriga acknowledges challenges in education sector and pledge to support toward the initiative that he believes will greatly contribute in addressing some of the problems. “Many of our students are facing challenges, they cannot go ahead and they need support. So when we have such funds (initiatives) when properly channeled and used in the rightful place, it can be able to contribute in educating our children, we support this idea so much” DEO welcomed the idea.

Yumbe is among the districts in West Nile with high rate of dropout; the district education department report for last year revealed that, only 20% of 28,302 learners who joined primary one class about 7-years ago sat for Primary Leaving Examination, indicating 80% dropout rate in primary section alone, this is not much different at secondary level.

This is attributed to poor attitude towards education, poverty, teenage pregnancy, child marriage and lack of support for the learners to continue.