In an article on educational planning, C. Arnold Anderson and Mary Jean Bowman (1968) suggest that there is a conflict between equity and efficiency in the distribution of schools. Since independence, each Anglophonic African state has altered the English educational inheritance of local religious and voluntary schools and has opted in favor of a more centralized system of state control. Centralized control, according to Anderson and Bowman, could theoretically act as a vehicle for an increase in equity by spreading schools more evenly throughout the population and therefore limiting the advantages which could accrue to the children of the privileged. On the other hand, the authors view centralized control as a device which might obstruct the efficient utilization of schools, since the pattern of school distribution reflects the local population's interest in education and their effort to acquire it.

By extension, Anderson and Bowman infer that localized decision-making would tend to maximize efficiency. They say that “[in] localities where given educational efforts will evoke the largest response in attendance and in demand for further schooling … [such effort] tends to be realized by local interest and resources” (1968: 361).

I wish to explore the Anderson and Bowman equity-efficiency dilemma by focusing upon Uganda as a case in point. I do not differ substantially from them. As assumed from their thesis, there have been changes in efficiency and in equity since Ugandan government became involved in primary education. But in contrast to the expectations of their thesis, I question whether the effect of government involvement has not been detrimental to three specific areas of equity—the same equity under whose guise centralized action was originally motivated.