International Children’s Day-2023

It’s a very beautiful thing to work around children in Uganda. They are so interactive and welcoming. Their openness and happy moods are easily transferred to those working with them and it is easy to tell anybody who works with them just by a mere look at a distance. The brightness in their faces is brought about by the joyous activities they share with the children and that’s why many people have this perception that a teacher never grows old.

In Uganda, once a child grows up into a toddler, the first thing that comes into the parents’ mind is school and as a results, many of the children begin to understand when already in school. Usually their time at home is limited. You find that they have only interacted a little with the people at home, but they don’t really remember much of that.

So today I will briefly talk about how schools and their administrations have a very big role in making impact on a child’s life. First and foremost, every child has a right and when we talk about children’s rights, rights we are looking at first and foremost their health.

Children have a right to having good health regardless of the health differences they may be having, at times generic or simply caused by whatsoever is happening around them. The child must be taken care of to see that amidst any challenges, they can live the best way ever. If it is one that requires medical care, has the parent taken step towards address that? Similarly, if the child is in the hands of the school mostly nowadays where boarding schools are now starting right from nursery section even day-care session that is ‘play group one’ and a child is unwell, have they taken care of how to deal with it? So a child’s health matters a lot. It is one of the biggest factors for a child because to have a child of course a child must be alive, how they feed and the rest to do with their sanitation well-being.

Then the other right for children is Education. And this is why you see many people are looking at it as the number one thing these days. Actually, education is serving as an umbrella for the rest of the rights. It’s covering all the rights so I will talk about it last.

The other right for a child is Family. A child has a right to having a family as a human being. The first society for a child is family is home. That’s where life begins. So that’s why it is not okay to find children along the streets. It is not right. Especially if the day ends and the child is supposed to sleep there. It is not right that child is not enjoying the right of family if the family is not living with them there. If a child is living alone and has to struggle to get what to eat and at the end of the day look for where to sleep, it is not right. They don’t have that brain to choose the best at that age, still not mature enough to decide for the best. That means the child is not safe.

A child has a right to play/recreation. This is how they grow. This is how they build up their mind to become the big people we see now. If a child does not play, the child does not explore. So we need to allow these children to enjoy the right to play. I put education involved at a certain point.

Education is carrying all these in a basket. It is carrying all the children’s rights. You find that a child goes to school and the administration has to cater for all the rest of the rights for the biggest time of the year. The school administration is taking care of all the children’s rights currently. You find that they have very limited time with their parents or at home with family. A term goes for three months totalling to (9) nine months out of the twelve months that make up a year and even when you counted it as a child being a day scholar, nowadays, day scholars are using vans that drop them back home often times past 06:00 p.m. yet picks them from home as early as 05:00 a.m. So their life in school covers most of their time in life.

It’s very exciting to know it that the school administration has done a lot. They have established favourable environments, to cater for the children’s rights and growth especially for schools that are looking at the aspect of a child having to live to be alive, learning and growing. Now, when you consider all three factors; Life, Learning and Growing, you find that they have to cater for all the child’s right to those three outcomes with the support of nurses to handle health care, teachers to facilitate the learning and a playground for the child’s recreation and play.

Some schools have made efforts to put some toys in the classrooms mostly in the day-care or nursery sections in a toy corner. So a child is enjoying a full package at school, which you sometimes don’t find at home. Many times a home is for the parents and the house help, who is governing it. In the absence of the parents, the house help can take advantage because there is no supervision which makes the environment majorly favouring the caretaker and when the parents are back sometimes they are also into themselves because they have a number of issues to solve in a short time. They may get buried in their phones, television programmes that do not relate with the children among other engagements. This kind of presses the child to the wall and so many times schools have done it better in the lives of children.

Speaking as a teacher, I have seen this, I have the experience in this. You find many children do not want to leave school after school time. Those are for schools which are doing things the right way. You find a child is enjoying the package and is feeling a life away from home, the life they deserve. They’re finding it at school, which is not good, which is not bad. It’s good, yes, because the child spends more time at school. But it’s not good that at home it is not the same, otherwise it would be balanced. It would better that at school the child finds the right things they need and at home he/she finds better because home is home. That is where they belong. And for school being public, a child can always change where they study depending on the situation around them, maybe they have shifted and many other reasons so please, a child’s right is a child’s right. Let us see that these children enjoy over their rights at all times, whether at home or at school. And as for the schools that have not yet worked on their programs, their programs, please, it is very important that you work on the programs so that they come down to the level of the children, with that done we can groom children who are alive, learning, growing and very, very productive for the future of our country.

On the other hand, for the schools operating on lower budgets mostly those in the rural areas, when it comes to employing a nurse, a school may not be able, I understand. However, you find that in the same village there are a number of clinics operating where the parents to these children, in case the child got maybe an infection or is not feeling well, those parents usually use the same clinics. So it would be wise for the school administration to collaborate with such clinics for cases of emergency. Identify a nurse to support the children whether physically or virtually through a telephone call however its best when they are within close range with the school. The most important thing is having a standby person, some professional medical personnel.

And then when it comes to recreation, I would look at it in regards to leisure. Every human being has the right to leisure irrespective of age or location. Children in urban areas have toys and if somebody had a toys shop, it would be really booming because the standard of the children there matches it. Parents will come and buy some. That’s why schools in the urban setup have looked at it as a priority. So they put these toys because that’s the way children in urban areas play. They know that toys are used for these toys and they will use them very well. When you go to the village setup, you find children doing the same things using different materials. They will collect some sand and construct a house where the other ones are using building blocks. You will find they’ve picked some stones, some wood, and they’re driving around same thing in different places, using different materials. So if a school in the rural area would leave that environment that favours the child to have this moment, that time at break time, after they have had a snack and there is ample time to relax. It’s actually a matter of leaving a room for creativity in the child’s mind. Does the environment favour the child’s mind to be creative, to find something to use? Or is the environment it only looking at academics like other schools? Other than having a nursery child coming to school straight to class to do the ABCs, mathematics on the walls, after counting numbers, they go have their snack back to class, after snacks, after classes, back home. Such an environment is not favourable for a child’s creativity. It’s only teaching them the theoretical work.