Uganda’s education allocation of shs6.66 trillion represents approximately 7.9% of the shs84.39 trillion national budget presented by Finance Minister Henry Musasizi at Kololo Independence Grounds on June 12, 2026.
The sector took 8.4% in financial year 2023/24, down from 8.7% in 2022/23. The nominal figure climbs every year. The share has been declining.
Those are two different stories, and Thursday’s press releases told only one of them.
Security took shs10.21 trillion. Transport took shs8.79 trillion. Education and sports came third at shs6.66 trillion. Health received shs5.23 trillion.
In a country where a majority of the population is under twenty-five, education finishing behind both roads and the military is a policy choice, not an accident. Reasonable people can disagree on whether it is the right one.
Nobody should mistake the headline figure for ambition. The education sector received shs4.2 trillion in financial year 2024/25, then shs5.04 trillion in 2025/26.
Financial year 2026/27 brings it to shs6.66 trillion. Three consecutive increases, each larger than the last, in a budget also funding a standard gauge railway and the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations preparations.
That trajectory is genuine. But Uganda’s total budget grew faster than its education share, and Uganda has been spending around 2.3% of GDP on education on average since 2018/19.
The UNICEF Uganda Education Budget Brief cites the Incheon Declaration’s education finance target, at least 4 to 6% of GDP or 15 to 20% of total public expenditure, as the internationally agreed minimum.
Uganda meets neither threshold. It is not trending toward either. The allocation covers educational access and quality, STEM and vocational programmes, teacher welfare, and sports infrastructure for the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations.
Stadium construction and classroom construction sit inside the same figure. Until government publishes the Ministerial Policy Statement with sub-sector breakdowns, the education-only number is unknown, and every analysis citing the headline figure, including this one, carries that gap.
Shs568.65 billion is earmarked to enhance salaries for primary school teachers, secondary school arts teachers, and vocational instructors. Evidence on teacher attrition, absenteeism, and quality decline points back to remuneration, so moving money specifically toward teacher welfare is the right call.
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What the speech did not say is what that figure translates to per teacher per month, after the wage bill moves through district payroll systems with a documented history of delays. The budget line and the teacher’s September pay slip are not the same document.
The proportion of education spending flowing to districts declined from 62% to 55% to 52% across 2023/24; 2024/25, and 2025/26 financial years. That data covers 2025/26 and earlier; the 2026/27 district share is not yet published.
But structural patterns do not reverse without deliberate intervention, and Thursday’s speech made no such intervention explicit. Teachers work in districts. Children learn in districts. If that share has continued falling, the growth in Uganda’s headline figure is accumulating at the centre while schools at the end of dirt roads see near-constant allocations.
Bunyoro and Busoga universities reduce a real inequity. For decades, northern and western Uganda have had significantly fewer tertiary options per capita than the central region, and students from those areas have carried a geographic disadvantage into every higher education application.
Operationalising those two universities reduces it in ways that matter to real families. The STEM and vocational emphasis connect to something equally concrete: the broader budget targets commercial agriculture, industrialisation, and digital transformation, and Uganda cannot industrialise with an education system that produces neither scientists nor skilled tradespeople.
The language is right. Execution is what Uganda has struggled to deliver, from curriculum reform to teacher training to equipment that actually arrives in a laboratory.
Three figures, arriving across the next twelve months, will reveal more about this budget than anything in Thursday’s speech. The district share of education spending, due in the mid-year budget implementation report by January 2027, will show whether the headline growth is reaching schools or stopping at the centre.
What appears on a primary school teacher’s pay slip in September will confirm whether the shs568.65 billion salary enhancement moved through the system or stalled in it.
The Ministerial Policy Statement, once published, will separate the education-only allocation from sports infrastructure and give us the number the headline should have used.
Uganda’s per capita education spending has been increasing, but more children arrive in the system every year. The budget grows in nominal terms. The share contracts. The per-learner investment, in real terms, is under pressure that shs6.66 trillion does not capture.
A government that knows its population is this young and this fast-growing, and still allocates less than 8% of its budget to education, is making a bet that other priorities, roads, oil revenue, security, will carry weight that learning does not.
That bet may pay off. But it is a bet, and yesterday’s budget speech did not say so.
The writer, Allan Obua, is a senior education and development professional.
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