KAMPALA — For the last 20 years, Sarah Namatovu dropped her 2-year-old son at the same gate where Primary One pupils lined up. One building, two systems. Babies sleeping on mats in the back room while 4-year-olds recited ABCs next door. It was normal. It was cheap. It was convenient for working parents.
That system is now over.
Government has rolled out a new Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) policy that bans nursery schools and kindergartens from running daycare centres under the same roof. The goal is not to close daycares. It is to force a divorce between “childcare” and “early learning” — two jobs that Kampala has treated as one for decades.
What Actually Changes on the Ground
Until now, most private nursery schools in Kampala ran a “dual wing” model. The daycare wing took infants from 6 months to 3 years. The nursery wing handled 3 to 5-year-olds with a basic curriculum. Same compound, same head teacher, same license — or often, no license at all for the daycare side.
Under the ECCE policy, that stops. A school registered as a nursery cannot legally admit a child below 3 years for daycare. If you want to run a daycare, you must register separately, meet different standards, and operate from a different facility or a clearly demarcated section with its own staff, toilets, and entry point.
The Ministry argues that mixing toddlers and pre-primary learners creates three problems:
Safety Gaps Become Deadly
Daycare babies need sleeping mats, feeding chairs, and 24/7 supervision. Nursery kids need desks, play areas, and lesson time. When one matron watches both groups, mistakes happen. The recent Ggaba incident, where four toddlers died in a school setting, forced Government to admit that blurred lines kill. Investigations showed the facility was licensed as a nursery, not a daycare, yet infants were present. The tragedy became the final push for a policy that had been sitting in draft since 2022.
Learning Gets Watered Down
Inspectors found that many nursery teachers spent mornings changing diapers instead of teaching phonics. Head teachers, under pressure to increase enrollment, admitted babies to hit numbers. The result: 5-year-olds leaving nursery without basic literacy because class time was eaten by childcare. Government now wants nursery schools to focus purely on “school readiness” — numbers, letters, social skills — for ages 3 to 5. Anything below that is care, not education.
Regulation Was Impossible
You cannot inspect what you cannot define. For years, district education officers visited “nursery schools” and ignored the daycare wing because it had no legal status. That loophole allowed unqualified staff, unsafe buildings, and overcrowding. By splitting the two, Government can license daycares under social development guidelines and nurseries under education guidelines. Two permits, two sets of rules, two types of inspectors.
What Happens to Parents Like Sarah?
This is the hard part. The dual system survived because it solved a Kampala problem: where do you put a 1-year-old when you work in Owino or Nakawa? Standalone daycares are fewer, expensive, and mostly in upscale areas. Many working mothers in Bweyogerere, Nansana, and Kyanja relied on the Shs50,000/month nursery-daycare combo.
Government says daycares are not banned. But separation means costs will rise. A nursery that wants to keep a daycare must now hire separate staff, rent extra space, and apply for a second license. Many will simply drop the daycare side. That pushes parents to either pay more for licensed daycares or turn to unregulated “auntie” arrangements in residential houses.
The Ministry promises tighter regulations and clearer guidelines within 90 days. They also hint at subsidies for community-based daycares to fill the gap. But for now, the message to school owners is blunt: choose one. You are either a school or a daycare. You cannot be both without meeting both standards.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Kampala’s nursery-daycare mix was born from necessity, not negligence. We lacked public daycare options. We lacked enforcement. So private schools stepped in and improvised. The ECCE policy is an attempt to clean up that improvisation after it turned tragic.
Separation will improve safety. It will improve learning. But it will also price out the exact mothers the policy claims to help — market vendors, secretaries, maids — unless Government moves fast to license affordable alternatives.
For Sarah Namatovu, the ban means one thing: by next term, her son’s school will take 3-year-olds only. She has 8 weeks to find a new place for her 2-year-old, or quit her job.
That is the gap between policy and pavement. And that is where the next fight will be.
