*Re:Ministry for Diaspora Affairs.*
To the Chairperson, UNAA Dear friend, Thanks for the last UNAA Convention. In that Convention it was decided to explore a Ministry for Diaspora Affairs. At first I was skeptical, but if you strip away the name/tittle the issue is about services that we can extend home or receive from there. Mr Chairma, USA is ‘melting pot’ while Canada is made up of ethnic enclaves. For our Tax Returns to us Africans they built Somalis an apartment complex in the Don Mills area of Toronto. It became plagued with problems. Now with a lot of fanfare the Governor General of Canada has put *a $75million Tax Return* Check on the table. He says we should use this money for *educating our people*. At first I thought we should organize essays and research papers in Maths, in Uganda. Since for any student with an “A” in Maths entry to any Science or Engineering program here is a given I imagined that if we collected ten or so fine essays on top of the “A” grade, Ugandans here would be obliged to guide these students through the system to this money. It is our sweet kyeyo money after all. It would be inexcusable to leave it on the table. The Diaspora Ministry, under some other tittle, with a narrower focused scope, looks like a fantastic short cut. It was in Southern Africa where I realized that Canada uses their diplomatic Bag to send Canadian exams and scholastic materials to their expatriate personnel that have families. Also Canada offers more than Six Maths syllabuses for their schools. The system here used to be thirteen years, like back home but was since changed to twelve years, like Kenya’s ( I.e. our S5). As a result all Universities are crying out about the Maths paucity. With this twelve year system, our S5 equivalent, it is very very hard for our youths to get into competitive programs. At times entry requirements are over 97%. With an A.L. (s6), admission becomes a non-issue. The question reduces just to funding. Last year on the street I met a Budo OB youth. The application deadline for these fantastic programs had already passed but they were ready to reopen it for this young man. They are scratching the barrel for anybody competent enough in Maths. My suggestion is this. For our kids here who have finished S5 Linear Algebra, we get Parliament at home to order Uganda National Examination’s Board *to structure and make available exams for S6 Linear Algebra, *and have our Ottawa Embassy Administer an exam centre. ( I have experience in this as I used to be an Examiner with UNEB.) S6 qualifications and background is going to make their studies here much simpler, and also to access the funding Also This exercise may help our people at home to take this S5 content and beef it up to S6 levels to also offer these same Maths programs in our schools there. No need to re-invent the wheel. So my friend, though it still is a good idea to have youths do Maths essay and research competition, this seems faster to implement. No bottlenecks about availability of teachers etc…. Let me stop here for the time being, and salutations to all. Thank you for your time. MitPot.
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