Employees working for an American firm, Agile Learning, have appealed to the Inspector General of Government (IGG) and the ministry of Education to intervene, saying the company disappeared without paying them their wages.

Agile Learning was contracted to implement multi-billion dollar education projects in Uganda on behalf of the US government.

The workers, who have petitioned both the IGG, Ms Irene Mulyagonja, and the Education minister Jessica Alupo, and permanent secretary Dr Rose Nassali, say they have also sought the intervention of Usaid, the project funders, to compel Agile to pay them but in vain. The company’s offices have since been closed over accumulated bills and the managers are not responding to any correspondence.

“Usually, in all Usaid projects, staff sign contracts and they are paid severance package at the end of the contract period. However, in our case, the president of the company, Mr James Curry, duped us into beginning work without contracts, claiming his human resource department, based in the US, was still working on them and would send them in the due course but this did not happen, so we were made to work without contracts for the whole period of two years,” reads the petition seen by this newspaper.

The employees said the company was hired again by the ministry to conduct mapping of all schools in the country, on which deal they were only paid for three months out of the seven worked.

“When we complained, instead of resolving the issues, Mr Curry decided to divide the staff into one of Agile International, comprising of Rwandan nationals, and Agile Local, of Ugandans only. Our efforts to have this matter resolved amicably have come to nothing because he has since stopped replying our emails and Agile has been closed,” the petition further reads. Mr Curry did not pick up or return our calls for a comment on this story for two weeks nor did he respond to our email inquiries.

Duped?

Asked why they agreed to sign contracts for the second project before establishing the contract contents, the workers said the company had told them it was a big project funded by Usaid through the US Embassy-Uganda, so there was no need to worry.

Officials at the US embassy in Kampala admitted that Usaid had a contract with Agile but said it had ended and they had also not received a formal complaint regarding the project or the implementer.

“Usaid Uganda’s contract with Agile Learning, Inc., in support of the Education Management Information System (EMIS) II programme, expired in April 2014. The agreed upon goods and services were delivered as per the contract,” Dan Travis, the Public Affairs Officer at the US Embassy, said.

Dr Nassali said the ministry was aware of the matter but since they had not contracted the company, it would be hard to prevail on it. “The best thing we can do is to blacklist the company for future jobs with us,” she said.

However, Sunday Monitor has learnt that Agile is already in discussions with the World Bank for a contract to implement another mega project, but the aggrieved workers want to block it.

Ms Ali Munira, the spokesman of the Inspectorate of Government, said they had received the petition and investigators were studying how to handle it.