Education at the Margins: Advancing the Right to Learn in Uganda's Urban Informal Settlements

• In Event: Climate education, informal settlements, and ubuntu leadership

Proposal

Introduction
Education is widely recognized as a cornerstone of peacebuilding: it reduces inequality, fosters trust, and helps prevent violence. However, education can also reproduce exclusion and deepen social divisions. This paradox is starkly visible in Uganda. On one hand, Uganda is celebrated for its inclusive refugee education policy, which deliberately seeks to integrate refugee children into national schools. On the other hand, children living in the informal settlements of Kampala and Mukono (mostly Ugandan citizens) face profound barriers to accessing quality education despite constitutional guarantees and the Universal Primary Education (UPE) framework (APHRC, 2023).
In these urban informal settlements, the right to education is both a constitutional guarantee and a fragile aspiration. This contrast reveals a troubling pattern of educational stratification: refugee learners, supported by international aid, often experience more structured inclusion, while urban poor citizen children are systematically marginalized through hidden costs, overcrowded classrooms, and reliance on low-fee private schools. This raises fundamental questions: Why does Uganda’s education system extend inclusion selectively? What does this mean for education’s potential as infrastructure for peace?
Theoretical Framing
This study situates the Ugandan case within the broader field of peace education theory, engaging three foundational perspectives:
• John Paul Lederach’s conflict transformation approach positions schools as infrastructures for peace, where divided groups can encounter one another and foster mutual recognition (Lederach, 1997).
• Betty Reardon’s conception of peace education emphasizes human rights and the dismantling of structural violence as core to sustainable peace (Reardon, 1988).
• Johan Galtung’s theory of structural violence helps explain how inequitable access to education perpetuates exclusion and resentment (Galtung, 1969).
By integrating these perspectives, this research argues that Uganda exemplifies how education, when stratified, shifts from serving as a fundamental right and a peacebuilding tool to becoming a mechanism that exacerbates structural inequalities.
Data and Methods
This analysis draws on comprehensive mixed-methods research combining multi-scalar data sources:
• APHRC Urban Education III (UEIII) Survey (2023): Surveyed 1,102 households (2,581 children aged 3–19) in Kampala and Mukono’s informal settlements, complemented by interviews with parents, teachers, and education officials.
• World Bank Refugee and Host Communities Household Survey (2018): Included 16,000 households to compare educational access between refugee and host children.
• World Bank High-Frequency Phone Surveys (2020–2024): Captured COVID-19 impacts on schooling, enrollment, and recovery patterns across refugee, host, and urban poor households. Interviewed 3,098 households with a substantial urban sample.
This triangulation enables a comparison across urban informal settlements, refugee communities, and host communities, revealing overlapping yet distinct educational inequities.
Key Findings
Educational Access and Stratification
• In urban informal settlements, 68% of children from the poorest households attend private schools, increasing to 71.7% at the secondary level. This is driven by hidden costs and weak quality in government schools (APHRC, 2023).
• Government schools suffer from overcrowding, with pupil–teacher ratios as high as 55:1, limited learning materials (pupil–textbook ratios of 8:1 in mathematics), and poor sanitation facilities (pupil–toilet ratios of 60–66:1).
• Refugee learners largely depend on under-resourced government schools or NGO-supported facilities, which face even more severe challenges.
• Host communities report increased competition with refugee peers for scarce resources, occasionally heightening tensions over shared services (World Bank, 2018).
COVID-19 and Crisis-Amplified Inequities
• Out-of-school rates in informal settlements rose sharply from 2.1% before the pandemic to 9.0% after schools reopened.
• Girls were disproportionately affected, with teenage pregnancies contributing to higher dropout rates (9.2% for girls vs. 8.6% for boys).
• Only 15% of the poorest households accessed remote learning opportunities during school closures, widening the educational divide (World Bank, 2020–2024).
Rights and Community Agency
• Awareness of the right to education is high across contexts; 90.8% of parents in urban informal settlements recognize education as a right (APHRC, 2023).
• Urban poor parents often rely on informal networks for support and encouragement to enroll children (61.8%), whereas refugees typically depend on humanitarian education committees.
• Host communities demonstrate weaker agency, sometimes framing refugee education as competing with their own access further reinforcing divisions.
Theoretical and Policy Contributions
This comparative evidence advances peace education theory by highlighting:
• Multi-layered structural violence: Urban poverty, displacement, and resource competition each generate overlapping but distinct educational inequities.
• Educational markets as sites of division and cooperation: The coexistence of state, private, and humanitarian educational providers creates fragmented schooling “tracks” that stratify learners by socioeconomic or legal status.
• Community agency as peacebuilding resource: Despite systemic neglect, marginalized communities mobilize diverse strategies to defend educational rights, aligning with Lederach’s emphasis on local capacities for peace.
• Rights-based peace education: Achieving universal realization of the right to education is essential to advancing social cohesion and dismantling structural violence.
Policy Implications
To realize education’s potential as peace infrastructure in Uganda, reforms must:
• Eliminate hidden costs and extend UPE protections fully to households in urban informal settlements.
• Integrate humanitarian and state education provision to avoid parallel refugee and citizen schooling systems.
• Strengthen teacher deployment, infrastructure, and regulatory oversight in low-resource settings.
• Recognize and support community-based advocacy networks that protect the right to education.
Conclusion
Uganda exemplifies both the promise and perils of education as a tool for peacebuilding. The inclusive approach for refugees demonstrates how education can mitigate social divisions when backed by adequate resources. Yet, the concurrent exclusion of urban poor citizen children highlights educational stratification that undermines peace and violates the universal right to education.
For education to fulfill its role as peace infrastructure, inclusion must evolve from selective to systemic equity, ensuring all children, regardless of status or geography, enjoy the right to learn.
Relevance to the CIES Theme
This study speaks to the CIES 2026 theme, "Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World," by investigating how education in Uganda's informal settlements and refugee-hosting districts both reflects and shapes social divisions. Grounded in peace education theory, drawing on Lederach's conflict transformation framework (1997), Reardon's rights-based peace education (1988), and Galtung's structural violence analysis (1969), the research demonstrates how educational stratification can transform schools from infrastructures for peace into mechanisms that deepen social divisions. By centering African perspectives often absent from global debates, this work offers actionable insights for education systems in fragile contexts.

Authors

• Kennedy Marigi Kamau, African Population & Health Research Centre

• Alvin Joseph Kimani Nyambina, African Population & Health Research Centre