Who cast a spell on schools in the East of Uganda
The sad reaction to the news that he had scored aggregate 29 in last year's Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) said it all. Robert Wangota, 13 was distraught.
“I let myself and my parents down. I had expected to perform well and my parents had high hopes in me,” Wangota, who hails from Bubetsye village in Nyondo sub-county, Mbale district in Eastern Uganda, said plaintively.
Wangota had expected better grades having scored aggregate 11 in the mock examinations. He sat his exams at Nyondo Primary School.
Wangota was however not the only pupil from the Eastern region of Uganda who underperformed.
Thousands of pupils from the districts of Mbale and Bududa performed poorly in last year’s Primary Leaving Examinations, which were released in January.
Of the 7,260 pupils from Mbale district who sat the 2017 PLE examinations, 1,327 failed; which is 18.7% of the candidates. In Bududa, there were 454 (16.5%) failures out of the 2,741 pupils who sat the exams.