COVID-19 Educational Disruption: Makerere University ECD Project Response

Like other governments around the world, Government of Uganda (GoU) temporarily closed its educational institutions in an attempt to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. This nationwide closure of education institutions is impacting the education landscape in unprecedented ways. Over 10,646,478 students in pre-primary, primary, secondary and tertiary institutions have been affected by the nation wide education institutional closures as follows:

School Type Females Males Total

Pre-primary 307,450 301,523 608,973

Primary 4,445,076 4,395,513 4,697,036

Secondary 568,553 462,967 1,031,520

Tertiary 72,183 93,213 165,396

Total 5,287,676 5,358,802 10,646,478

(Source: UNESCO, 2020)

Whereas some education institutions responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and schools closure by putting together Emergency Homework Packages (HWPs) in form of printed reading materials which they sent to parents to help keep their children engaged while at home, understandably, other schools did not get the needed time to design any pedagogically sound intervention. On the other hand, several educational managers who traditionally used to meet face-to-face to hold management meetings are now meeting online using different technologies such as https://hangouts.google.com/call, http://zoom.us, http://www.gotomeeting.com among other tools with the view to bolster their institution’s resilience during the pandemic.

Makerere University Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Project is supporting its collaborating ECCE teacher-training institutions in their efforts to mitigate the immediate impact of institutional closures, particularly for the more vulnerable preservice and inservice pre-primary teacher-trainees and to facilitate the continuity of education for all through Emergence Remote Teaching and Learning (ERT/L)

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