By Aggrey Baba
Uganda’s efforts to equip citizens with digital skills risk falling short unless government agencies, educational institutions and development partners harmonize their training programmes, align curricula and establish common standards for assessing and certifying skills, experts have warned.
The experts said the growing number of digital skilling initiatives across the country was encouraging, but warned that poor coordination, competing institutional mandates and unaligned training materials could lead to duplication of efforts and leave learners with skills that do not match the demands of employers.
They made the observations during a panel discussion at a stakeholder dialogue on strengthening Uganda’s digital skills ecosystem convened by the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), through the Uganda Communications Universal Service and Access Fund (UCUSAF), in partnership with the British Council.
Dr Moses, Manager for ICT and Media Services at the National ICT Government Centre, said institutional rivalry and the tendency for organizations to work within isolated mandates were among the biggest obstacles to effective collaboration.
“One of the challenges we have is to do with mandates and the way we do business, where my mandate is my mandate, their mandate is their mandate,” Moses said.
He argued that Uganda needed to break down these institutional barriers and develop a coordinated approach in which different organisations could combine resources, expertise and programmes instead of operating independently.
Moses cited the country’s experience in integrating information and communication technology into education, saying progress had been made through engagements between institutions operating under different ministries.
He said a delegation from the Ministry of Education had visited Kenya in 2018 to benchmark the implementation of the Competency-Based Curriculum, where he observed the use of television and radio as educational tools.
The experience, he explained, inspired efforts to strengthen the use of broadcasting in education, eventually leading to engagements involving the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of ICT and other partners.
Moses said such experiences demonstrated that collaboration was possible, but maintained that more needed to be done to bring together organisations delivering digital skills training.
He proposed the development of a common national curriculum or framework that would guide different players, reduce confusion among learners and ensure that training programmes meet agreed standards.
“Everybody is busy working, and we appreciate that. But the efforts are disintegrated. The curriculum they are using is not aligned,” he said.
Moses added that institutions sometimes reached the same beneficiaries with different programmes and approaches, making it difficult to build a consistent and sustainable digital skills ecosystem.
Dr Emma Otieno, who represented the African Telecommunications Union (ATU), also pointed to the absence of harmonized continental standards for ICT development and digital skills.
Otieno said African countries were only beginning to strengthen cooperation and develop common approaches, unlike regions such as Europe, which have made progress through more coordinated frameworks.
She noted that several countries were implementing digital skills initiatives, but the approaches remained varied, making it difficult to establish which models could be adopted as best practices across the continent.
Otieno cited Kenya as one of the countries that had advanced in developing digital skills programmes, while cautioning that more evidence was needed to determine which approaches were most effective.
She said greater collaboration, knowledge-sharing and harmonization would help African countries build more coherent systems instead of independently developing solutions to similar challenges.
At the same discussion, Dr Andrew Jombwe, Head of the IT Department at the TVET Council, said digital skills programmes should be judged not only by the number of people trained but also by whether those people secured employment and became productive.
He said the council was working with industry representatives and academics through sector skills committees to identify the competencies employers needed and ensure they were incorporated into training curricula.
Jombwe explained that the committees help identify relevant skills in different industries, which then inform curriculum development and programme approval.
He said the council also conducts tracer studies to establish how many trained people enter employment and how effectively they apply their skills.
“It is one thing to skill, but the most important thing is to skill for employability,” Jombwe said.
He added that Uganda needed to help skilled people become productive and create employment opportunities for others rather than simply increasing the number of certificate holders competing for limited jobs.
Jombwe also highlighted the need to recognise skills acquired outside formal education, particularly among people who have developed practical expertise through experience or informal apprenticeships.
He cited the example of an experienced mechanic who can repair complex vehicle engines despite lacking formal academic qualifications, arguing that such individuals should have opportunities to demonstrate their competencies and obtain recognised certification.
He said the TVET Council was working towards strengthening recognition of prior learning, while partnerships would be essential to expand access to affordable assessment and certification.
Dr Peter Nabende, Deputy Principal of Makerere University’s College of Computing, called for digital solutions and training materials to be adapted to Uganda’s linguistic and cultural realities.
Nabende said many digital platforms and learning resources were developed primarily in English, yet some of the communities targeted by digital inclusion programmes were more comfortable using their local languages.
He argued that translating and localizing digital solutions could make technology easier to understand and encourage more people to use it effectively.
“With over 70 languages in our country, we need to think about the people we are targeting,” was the central message of his submission on the need to make digital tools accessible to local communities.
Nabende also called for stronger partnerships between universities and employers to ensure that graduates acquire competencies relevant to industry needs.
He said institutions needed to engage more closely with government, businesses and communities so that training, research and innovation responded to real challenges and prepared graduates for employment.
Moses further argued that digital skills curricula should be learner-centred and regularly updated to reflect emerging technologies and the actual needs of young people.
He said training programmes would be less effective if their designers failed to understand the interests, circumstances and challenges of the people they intended to reach.
He also highlighted the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to translate learning materials into local languages, noting that collaboration with local technology developers could help expand access to digital education.
The panellists agreed that sustainable progress would require more than isolated training initiatives, calling for stronger coordination, partnerships, common standards, affordable certification and greater involvement of communities in designing digital skills programmes.
They said such measures would help Uganda move beyond counting the number of people trained to ensuring that digital skills translate into employment, productivity, enterprise development and wider participation in the digital economy. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
