Grace Natabaalo
20 July 2007
Kampala — UGANDA earned about $30 million (Shs50 billion) from international student enrolment in the country's secondary and tertiary institutions in 2005, the government announced yesterday.
Education Minister Namirembe Bitamazire said that the 2004/05 academic year brought in $23.7 million from foreign students at the secondary school level, $6.5 million from the students at the university level, and those in the tertiary institutions contributed $361,800 to the local economy.
Ms Bitamazire said Uganda was able to bag this money because foreign students are attracted by "our robust" education system.
"There is a high yield from the foreign students in the education sector because the Uganda education curriculum is robust and adjustable to different countries' education systems both for the inbound and outbound students," she said. "It allows different types of students to join at any level."
The biggest foreign student enrolment in universities in 2004/05, she told journalists yesterday at the Media Centre, was from Kenya at 2,924 students. Tanzania had 510, and Rwanda 148. Sudan had 138 students while Burundi turned in 123.
The minister declined to project how much more money Uganda is likely to make from foreign students in the future. She, however, said Uganda is working to present itself as a premier education market in the region. Accordingly, a Rwanda-Uganda Education Expo as one of the initiatives to showcase the country's education potential will take place in Kigali from July 27-30.
Such efforts, Minister Bitamazire said, should see the number of foreigners studying in Uganda rise to more than 1 million by 2010.
She said, however, that money accrued through the education service industry does not end up in the pockets of the ministry but stays with the respective institutions of learning where the foreign students study. Uganda currently hosts 28,000 international students in secondary schools and about 5,000 in its higher education institutions.
In 2005, excluding Kampala International University, universities around the country had 2,465 foreign students, followed by theological colleges with 129, colleges of commerce with 119, management colleges with 116, medical schools with 77, and national teachers colleges with 26.
With all public institutions and secondary schools combined, Kenya still topped the list with 20,716 students, followed by Tanzania with 5,211, DR Congo with 2,435, Sudan 2,457, and Rwanda with 1,228.
The Ministry of Education budget stands at Shs700 billion.
But the money generated from foreign students alone can be enough to cover the 2007/08 combined budgets for the ministries of ICT; gender, labour and social development; and lands, housing and urban development which amount to Shs18 billion.
Even with an additional Shs50 billion, the education sector in Uganda - which also runs a system of free education for both primary and secondary students - still faces challenges including a poor student-to-teacher ratio and poor infrastructure.
Ms Bitamazire said that the ministry would soon revamp government-run secondary schools and a noticeable change will be realised within four years. It was not possible to get comparable figures from any of the neighbouring countries by press time.
The United States, however, is the leading exporter of tertiary education services with 586,316 foreign students flocking that country in 2003, Unesco figures show. The United States, which made $7 billion from foreign students in 1996, is followed by the UK, Germany, France and Australia.
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