That is Uganda’s UCE pass rate for 2025.
428,628 out of 429,949 candidates. Certified. Qualified. Successful, on paper.
The headlines celebrated it as a triumph of the new Competency-Based Curriculum. Government officials cited it as proof that reform is working. Social media lit up with congratulations.
I want to sit with a different number for a moment.
23.2%
That is the proportion of Primary 7 pupils, children in their final year of primary school, who cannot read at a Primary 2 level.
Read that again.
One in four children who have spent seven years in Uganda’s primary school system cannot perform a task expected of a seven-year-old.
And here is the part that should stop every education leader, policymaker, and researcher cold:
In 2021, that figure was 11.3%. In four years, four years during which we launched a new curriculum, passed a National Teacher Policy, and celebrated rising exam results, the proportion of P7 children who cannot read basic English has more than doubled.
We did not improve. We regressed. While celebrating.
Two numbers. One broken system.
How is it possible that Uganda posts a 99.69% national exam pass rate while 23.2% of upper primary children cannot read?
The answer is not fraud. It is not a data error. It is something more structurally dangerous: we are measuring the wrong things, and calling it success.
The 2025 UCE results are the second cohort assessed under the new Competency-Based Curriculum grading framework. Under this system, performance is reported in achievement levels: A (Exceptional), B (Outstanding), C (Satisfactory), D (Basic), and E (Elementary).
To qualify for a certificate, a candidate must reach the Basic level, grade D, across the required subjects.
Not satisfactory. Not outstanding. Basic.
The system is designed to be inclusive, to ensure that learners who demonstrate foundational competency are not failed out of the system. That is a legitimate and humane policy intention. But when a 99.69% pass rate is produced by a threshold set at Basic, and then presented to the public as evidence of CBC’s success, we have crossed from inclusion into illusion.
The examiners themselves said so, in their own report.
UNEB’s 2025 UCE examiner reports noted that while more students reached the minimum competency level, “candidates struggled to link scenarios to practical problem-solving and creative thinking”, which are, by definition, the core aspirations of the Competency-Based Curriculum.
We passed 99.69% of children on a test of competency. The examiners then told us those children lack competency.
That is not a contradiction in the data. That is a contradiction in our measurement system.
The Uwezo verdict: what is actually happening in classrooms
In July and August 2024, Uwezo Uganda conducted its national learning assessment across 29 districts, 410 primary schools, and 8,608 households, assessing 21,057 children on foundational literacy and numeracy.
The findings, released in March 2025, are stark.
• Among Primary 3 learners, the proportion who could read beyond the word level in English fell from 22.4% to 18.5% between 2021 and 2024.
• In local languages, reading ability fell from 16.5% to 14%.
• The proportion of P7 children who cannot read at P2 level more than doubled, from 11.3% to 23.2%.
• Only the central region shows the highest outcomes, with 61% of children able to read. In large parts of Uganda, Northern, Eastern, Western, the majority of children in school are not reading at grade level.
Numeracy showed a partial bright spot: P3–P7 learners able to perform all four arithmetic operations improved from 50% to 60%. But foundational literacy, the gateway to all other learning, is moving in the wrong direction.
This is the educational reality inside which Uganda produced a 99.69% UCE pass rate.
Uganda is not alone, and that should concern us more, not less
This is not a uniquely Ugandan problem. It is a pattern that should be recognised across African education systems, because it reveals something structural about how we measure educational success on this continent.
Consider Ethiopia. For years, official pass rates ranged between 40 and 60 percent, figures that, as it turned out, rested heavily on widespread exam leaks and organised cheating. When the Ministry of Education implemented a crackdown, centralising examination management with biometric registration and computerised marking, the pass rate collapsed, to approximately 3% in 2022. By 2025, it had climbed back to 8.4%.
The knowledge had not vanished. The knowledge had never existed at the level the old pass rates implied. The system had been running on inflated numbers for years, and no one was accountable because everyone celebrated the headline.
In South Africa, the Matric Class of 2025 achieved a historic 88% pass rate, the highest on record. South Africa’s own education unions noted that the figure conceals the systemic practice of “culling” weaker students in Grades 10 and 11 before they reach the final exam. The students who fail are removed from the system before they become a statistic.
The headline survives. The children do not.
The continental pattern is this: when systems are under pressure to demonstrate reform success, the temptation is to adjust what we measure rather than change what we do. Pass rates are politically legible. Learning outcomes are not.
The grading question no one wants to ask publicly
There is a question that Uganda’s education research community needs to put on the table, carefully, rigorously, and without accusation, about what the new CBC grading framework is actually measuring.
The dramatic jump in pass rates, from 95.9% in 2023, to 98% in 2024, to 99.69% in 2025, happening concurrently with documented declines in foundational literacy demands a clear research question:
Is the rising pass rate evidence of improved learning, or evidence of a more permissive threshold being systematically applied?
This is not an accusation. It is a research question that the data requires us to ask.
Because if the answer is the latter, Uganda is not building competency. It is manufacturing the appearance of competency. And the downstream consequences of that, a workforce holding certificates that do not reflect skills, universities receiving students who cannot read analytically, employers encountering graduates who cannot apply knowledge, are not abstract future risks. They are already arriving.
What honest measurement requires
The problem is not that Uganda has bad data. Uganda has, in some respects, remarkably good data, the Uwezo assessments are rigorous, independent, and methodologically sound. UNEB publishes its examiner reports. The Uganda Bureau of Statistics conducts household surveys.
The problem is that the good data and the bad data are not being held in the same conversation. For Uganda to enter a genuine delivery decade, education accountability needs to change in three specific ways:
1. Disaggregate what “pass” means.
Publishing a 99.69% pass rate without the grade distribution is meaningless. How many students passed at Basic (D)? How many at Satisfactory (C)? The difference between a system producing 40% Satisfactory and above versus 80% Basic is enormous, and currently invisible in public reporting.
2. Mandate reconciliation between exam data and learning assessments.
Uwezo’s findings and UNEB’s results should be presented together, annually, to Parliament and the public. If they diverge, and they currently diverge significantly, that divergence must be explained, not ignored.
3. Track longitudinal cohorts, not snapshots.
A pass rate tells us what happened in one exam room on one day. A learning trajectory tells us whether children are actually developing capability over time. Uganda needs both, and the second is currently more honest than the first.
The real question CBC must answer
The Competency-Based Curriculum was designed precisely to fix the problem that exam-driven education had created: students who could pass tests but not apply knowledge. That was the diagnosis. The CBC was the prescription.
It is profoundly ironic, and worth examining, that two years into CBC’s examination cycle, UNEB’s own examiners are reporting that students cannot apply knowledge to practical situations.
This does not mean CBC has failed. It is too early to make that judgement. What it means is that changing the curriculum without changing teacher capability, classroom conditions, and assessment philosophy produces exactly what we are seeing: a new label on an old system.
A Competency-Based Curriculum taught through lecture, assessed through memorisation, in a classroom of 70 children, by a teacher trained under the old system, is not competency-based education. It is the old system wearing a new name.
The number we should be celebrating
Not 99.69%.
Not until it is accompanied by: the proportion of P3 children reading at grade level. The proportion of P7 children who can read beyond word level in their language of instruction. The proportion of S4 graduates who, tested independently, demonstrate the reasoning and application skills CBC promises.
Professor Kajubi gave Uganda 202 recommendations in 1989. The system responded by measuring inputs and celebrating access.
Thirty-five years later, we are measuring outputs and celebrating pass rates.
Neither is the same as measuring learning.
Until it is, the 99.69% is not a triumph. It is a question we have not yet answered.
