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Malawi and Uganda Moving beyond user payments In the mid-1990s, Malawi replaced a system of user payments with free primary education. Although government spending on primary education rose sharply, quality declined as school enrollment surged by 60 percent (1 million new students), leading to overcrowding and a shortage of teachers. A delay in donor funding contributed to the country's failure to prepare adequately for increased enrollment. Teacher performance also appears to have deteriorated, because parents, relieved of the financial burden, felt less compelled to monitor the teachers. On the other hand, parents were still expected to contribute labor and materials to school construction and to buy school supplies and clothes; this, together with the opportunity cost of forgone child labor, left total costs high for some parents. The result was a rise in dropout rates. By 1999, the primary completion rate was only 50 percent. Gender biases persisted as well. Uganda moved most of the way toward free universal primary education in 1997, when it waived tuition for up to four children per household. Families remained responsible for school supplies and contributions to construction, as in Malawi, and had to purchase uniforms and pay final examination fees as well. Uganda did better than Malawi, however, in preparing for the influx of new students. The government doubled the share of recurrent government spending targeted to primary education and used external aid to train new teachers, build classrooms, and purchase teaching materials. Even so, educational quality has fallen, with high pupil-teacher and pupil-classroom ratios and inadequate materials, and net enrollment has declined, from 85 percent in 1997 to 77 percent in 2000. Gender biases are still reported, as in Malawi. The experiences of these two countries demonstrate that universal public education cannot be achieved simply by abolishing fees and opening classroom doors. Obstacles arise on both the demand and the supply sides. Education can still be costly for the poor, thus discouraging enrollment, especially when maintaining quality is a problem. Maintaining quality, in turn, is not just a matter of increasing spending; good planning, implementation, and monitoring are also necessary. Achieving the goal of universal school attendance in both countries will require measures to relieve poor parents of all education-related costs, perhaps through a system of income transfers.