Ministry ofEducation and sports together with Uganda National Examination Board (UNEB) yesterday officially released the 2020 Uganda Certificate Examination results.
According to UNEB, a better performance was registered compared to 2019. 312,162 candidates passed compared to 288,387 who passed in the previous year.
2020 students deserve to be applauded as the journey to their exams was ‘abnormal.’ For starters, in March last year, government announced a total lockdown across the country where schools were ordered to close down with about seven months to the final examinations of the senior four students.
From the results released yesterday, Cyrus Kituyi and Emmanuel Wefafa, both from Trinity Senior Academy in Entebbe got Aggregate, 12 and 14 respectively.
When schools were closed last year in March, they went back to their home district, Namisindwa in the Eastern part of the country to begin home schooling amidst restriction from gathering and providing social distance with an impending national examination.
Kituyi said that he utilised the TV lessons to make sure that he got the best of the knowledge that he needed to study during the time for lockdown.
“I would tune in NTV and other stations depending on what subjects they were willing to offer and I got to learn a lot. Although I could not ask some of the questions of the topics I had not understood, I went ahead to ask my friends and also called the teachers who had given the lessons because they had left their contacts,” he said.
For Wafefe, his village has no access to electricity and at their home they had no TV. He disclosed that that even when they tried to form discussion groups with friends who live in the same locality, their gathering was dispersed by the police.
“I had nothing to do but get newspapers where they could publish study materials and I capitalised on those. Despite the fact that the notes were shallow, they helped me do more research from what I had been given from school. I read widely into the notes I had from senior one to three,” Wafefe said.
“In my village, we only have cinema halls but they did not allow us to put on local TV stations for us to follow the teachings because they were showing movies. I had to depend on what was available at the moment,” he added.
The two students who both say they are from poor families that can’t afford televisions say they had to seek help from the neighbors. They had luckily acquired sponsorship from Pure Heart Foundation, an organisation that helps to sustain hardworking students in school.
Emmaniuel Wanyama, the founder of the organisation said that he had started with the students in their senior one after they passed their examinations and had always hoped they would perform even better.
“When the lockdown came, I knew they would be disrupted but I encouraged them to continue reading because I knew where they come from. They have not disappointed but they would have even got better grades,” he said yesterday.