I spent the day in western Uganda touring the concession where Tullow Oil has drilled wells in search of the black stuff. Tullow has found plenty of what it's looking for, possibly priming Uganda to become Africa's next big oil producer.
Apropos of very little having to do with oil, this sign, next to a school near the shores of Lake Albert, struck me as curious.
Maybe I'm reading too much into a faded old sign, but why would the government feel compelled to note that Nyawaiga Primary School is "government aided?" Aren't all public primary schools government aided?
My theory on this has to do, perhaps oddly, with Uganda's reliance on foreign aid. Outside help makes up more than 40 percent of the country's budget. Everywhere you go, you see signs for schools, clinics, and other services that would be publicly funded in developed countries giving little shout-outs (shouts-out?) to the foreign NGOs or development agencies responsible for their existence.
You might think that the government, not donors, ought to be responsible for providing these services to its citizens, and you'd be right. But the Ugandan government, like many governments in Africa, provides so few of these things to its own people, particularly in rural areas. I suppose the existence of a school building that does not rely on foreign funding is an achievement that the government would want to trumpet.
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