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Support local scholarship initiatives

27th May 2009; The New Vision by Editorial

The Madhvani Foundation and Kampala International University deserve credit for taking the lead in initiating mass local university scholarships. The two institutions, and more recently, East African Breweries Limited, have, for a couple of years now, given billions of shillings to enable students from poor socio-economic backgrounds access university education.

While other universities and perhaps organisations also have some form of scholarships schemes, the three institutions above stand out because their scholarships are offered in the most transparent manner. Unlike others, their selection criteria involve a number of stakeholders completely de-linked from the awarding institutions.

The world over, university education is very expensive and is no longer the sole responsibility of the state. Matters are worse for the developing world, where resources are limited to afford state scholarship to a sizeable number of students joining higher institutions of learning.

In Uganda for instance, Government can only afford 4,000 scholarships to the over 50,000 qualifying students. It is, therefore, important that the private sector and industry, the main consumers of higher education products, come in to support.

However, the Government needs to provide some incentives to encourage more organisations and individuals to support higher education. For instance, such organisations or individuals could be given tax breaks or tax exemptions for charity causes like scholarships.

We could borrow a leaf from the US Charitable Tax Exemption, where for instance, if an organisation or individual donates to a charity, the amount donated is computed and deducted first before their tax calculations.

In a country where there is high suspicion that the bulk of public funds is swindled, more organisations and philanthropists will perhaps prefer donating a portion of their profits directly to a charity than to the tax man.

By doing so, the Government will still be supporting a public cause indirectly. Of course a mechanism has to be put in place to see that the central government operations are not crippled by the policy. Otherwise, it is high time local scholarship initiatives are supported.