Makerere University Vice Chancellor Prof. Barnabas Nawangwe has revealed that the 15 percent tuition increment policy will resume next academic year 2023/2024 after it was halted due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The 15 percent tuition increment policy was passed by the Makerere University Council in 2018 and was implemented in the 2018/2019 academic year.
This was however halted in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic that wreaked havoc for two consecutive years starting in March 2020 when the first case was registered in Uganda.
According to Prof. Nawangwe, the policy was to run for three years, but was however interrupted by COVID.
“We had implemented the tuition policy for three years but Covid struck, council took a decision and said since parents are facing hardships, lets us suspend the increment for two years. That was done two years back. Maybe from the next financial year, we should resume that,” the VC noted.
He therefore said that the increment is set to resume in 2023/2024 academic year.
The 87th Guild President, Ms Shamim Nambasa advised the University Council to instead drop the policy since students and parents are still facing difficulties to raise tuition,
“Before the university reinstates this policy, it should first analyse the current economic crisis in the country. We are struggling to raise the tuition, so we suggest that the policy should be abolished to avoid demonstrations like it was witnessed before,” she said.
The policy was supposed to be implemented every academic year since 2019 for the next five years, projected to end in 2023.
This meant that after five years, a student who would join the institution at the end of five years of implementation of this policy would pay 75 percent of tuition from the one that was paid by a student before tuition implementation in 2019.
This policy took effect with students who enrolled for the 2019/2020 academic year. This, however, triggered numerous demonstrations on the grounds that it would deny students from poor families access to education.
Nonetheless, the University Council’s did not change its decision and insisted that the policy was proposed by the Students Guild Council.
In a bid to strike a balance, the students’ leadership that was by then led by the Guild President, Mr. Papa Were Salim, then proposed a 15 percent increment to be levied on all courses for five years.
