Washington, September 10, 2014 -- The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) will provide Uganda with a US$100 million grant to improve primary education in the country. The grant will allow the government to buy more textbooks, construct more classrooms, train teachers, and provide advisory, technical, and capacity building activities to improve the overall education system. The grant agreement was signed by the Government of Uganda and the World Bank Group, which is the supervising entity for the GPE grant.

“This is an important moment for our relationship with Uganda and we are proud to support the country in its ambition to improve its education system and deliver better quality education to students. We need to ensure that we also reach the most marginalized children so everyone gets the same chance for a quality education”, said Alice Albright, Chief Executive Officer, Global Partnership for Education.

The three-year program is built around some of the core priorities of the Global Partnership for Education focusing on teacher effectiveness, early grade literacy and numeracy, girls’ access to safe and supportive learning environments and results-based programming.

The program is expected to provide training to 20,000 primary school teachers to enable them to improve the teaching of early grade reading and math for one million children. The program will reach eight million students with new textbooks and support the construction of new classrooms and improve school facilities in 293 schools.

The grant will also be used to improve school management and accountability and to ensure monitoring and evaluation and capacity-building throughout the education system.

The Ministry of Education and Sports and local governments will implement the program using existing institutional channels consistent with Uganda’s decentralized governance system responsible for the delivery of primary education.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Global Partnership for Education is made up of nearly 60 developing country governments, as well as donor governments, civil society/non-governmental organizations, teacher organizations, international organizations, and the private sector and foundations, whose joint mission is to galvanize and coordinate a global effort to provide a good quality education to children, prioritizing the poorest and most vulnerable. The Global Partnership for Education has allocated US$3.9 billion over the past decade to support education reforms in some of the world's poorest countries.