By Guest Writer
Eleven thousand job openings put in front of young Ugandans. Innovation hubs opened in five regions. A career grade created for government engineers who never had one. Five years of Dr Aminah Zawedde at the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, and what it changed for the young, for business, and for the state itself.
In almost every hall she has stood in over the past five years, Dr Aminah Zawedde has said a version of the same sentence.
“Investing in Uganda’s youth is investing in the country’s future.”
Plenty of officials say that. Fewer leave behind a count.
Three national ICT job fairs, in 2022, 2023 and 2024, put more than 11,000 jobs, internships and training places in front of young Ugandans. More than 160,000 citizens and small businesses were taken through digital skills training. A national outsourcing policy she launched in February 2025 is aimed at 150,000 jobs by 2030.
And a solar-powered classroom on wheels went to 58 sites in more than 25 districts and trained 8,192 people, nearly 43 per cent of them young women.
Zawedde had been Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance since July 2021. On 9 November the President redeployed her to the Office of the Prime Minister, in charge of coordination, and named Prof. Stephen Akandwanaho to take over at the ministry.
So the sector has begun doing the sums. They come out well.
Few civil servants leave office with a national medal already on the wall. President Yoweri Museveni decorated her for distinguished service to the nation in the field of ICT at the Labour Day celebrations in Namutumba District on 1 May 2023. She was listed among Africa’s top 45 women in digital transformation in 2025 and received the ABETO Peace Award in 2026.
The hubs went where the jobs were not
For years, a young Ugandan who wanted to build software had to come to Kampala. Zawedde set about changing that.
The National ICT Innovation Hub at Nakawa was rebuilt with UNDP support and reopened in January 2024. A hub opened at Kabale in June 2023, another at Soroti in March 2024, then more at Muni and Busitema universities.
The Ministry reports that over four years the national hub supported 133 start-ups, took 102 products to market and that firms based there created 726 verified jobs. Those are its own figures and nobody has audited them.
She was at Busitema in September when the second Spark Hub was handed over. The hubs, she said, “equip young people with the skills and support needed to innovate, create jobs, and contribute meaningfully to the digital economy”.
Training went to places that rarely feature in a ministry work plan. More than 1,230 refugees were trained alongside their host communities, and 619 of them were certified last year. Richer countries would not have spent scarce ICT money on people living in settlements.
Inside government, 5,587 officers passed through the Uganda Institute of ICT, and 843 of them completed a national artificial intelligence programme in the last financial year. A further 6,000 officials, students and ICT workers were certified under a project with the ITU and China that closed in March 2025.
A career for the young engineer
One change she made in 2023 will outlast all of those numbers, and only a former lecturer would have thought of it.
Schemes of service for the IT and communications cadres were issued that year, and those officers now report to the Ministry of ICT as their parent. Before that, a young systems engineer who joined government had no grading structure, no career path and no professional home. The job was a dead end, so the good ones left.
Zawedde spent fifteen years teaching at Makerere, watching her best students go to the private sector or abroad. She used her office to build them somewhere to be promoted to.
What changed for businesses
If you have registered a company in Uganda in the last three years, you have used her work without knowing it.
Registration used to take 10–15 days. It now takes about three hours. The online register went live in December 2022 and 279,567 businesses have come through it since, with URSB collecting UGX 71.81 billion in non-tax revenue through the system in a single financial year.
Uganda’s technology firms got something bigger. In June 2026 the PPDA accredited the Ministry’s innovator selection process. Put plainly, a ministry can now buy software from a registered pool of Ugandan innovators without the procurement rules treating a four-person Kampala company as too risky to deal with.
Anyone who has watched a capable local developer lose a contract to a foreign firm on paperwork alone knows what that took, and how long it took.
The guidelines that protect what those firms build came in 2025, and URSB registered 3,295 intellectual property filings and grants in FY2024/25, with copyright registrations up 43 per cent in a year.
The cost of getting online fell as well. Government was paying USD 70 per megabit a month for internet in 2021. It now pays USD 35. The fibre backbone grew to 5,266 km and reaches 1,682 government sites. Starlink was licensed in May for the places fibre will not reach for years yet.
And the work started coming in from outside. Uganda ranked 24th of 193 countries on this year’s Global Outsourcing Talent Index, second in East Africa behind Kenya, having been nowhere near the top 30 in 2021. Under a project with Japan, Ugandan firms including Maarifasasa and Sumic IT Solutions now hold paid contracts with Japanese clients.
Code written in Kampala, invoiced in yen. Five years ago that was a pitch deck. Now it is an invoice.
The state learns to run on software
In mid-2021 the Ministry was a policy office. It wrote frameworks, convened stakeholders and issued guidance. It counted nine national systems. When another ministry needed software built, ICT was a voice in the room rather than the hand on the contract.
It now counts 43, and four of them carry weight the country would feel immediately if they stopped.
The Parish Development Model register checks a beneficiary against the national identity database before a shilling leaves the account, then tracks the money. It has paid 3,571,108 people and carried UGX 4.317 trillion into the Parish Revolving Fund, on Ministry of Finance figures published in September.
The schools register replaced software installed in 1999. It now holds more than 11 million learners and 145,000 staff, and all 178 Local Governments use it. When Ibanda District checked its own list against the new system, 105 closed schools fell off the books. That is one district out of 178.
Thirty-eight government entities moved their files onto a records system the state can maintain with its own officers. And the business register, as above.
All of them were built by Ugandan firms under Ministry contracts, and Uganda owns the code. That was the harder path. The easy one is a foreign licence, a renewal bill every year in a currency we do not print, and a vendor who owns the system your parishes and your schools depend on.
In May this year she opened a Government Digital Registry and counted what the state actually runs, which nobody had done before: about 743 systems and 489 business processes across 154 entities.
The written rules arrived alongside the systems. The Digital Transformation Roadmap, launched in August 2023, is now the anchor of the digital transformation programme in the fourth National Development Plan. Cabinet approved the National Communication Policy in March 2026. The National Data Strategy followed on 20 October, three weeks before the succession began.
The money followed too. The Ministry’s programme budget was about UGX 104 billion in FY2022/23. For this financial year it is about UGX 490 billion.
The person they sent in
None of this was obvious in July 2021, and the appointment itself was unusual.
Permanent secretaries, here and most places, are generalists. Zawedde is a software engineer. She holds a PhD in software engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, earned in 2016, and before that she spent fifteen years teaching and researching at Makerere’s School of Computing and Informatics Technology.
Her specialist field is system dynamics, the study of how complicated systems behave over time and which lever actually moves them. She is a founding member of the discipline’s Africa chapter. She had also served on the NITA-U board and chaired its Digital Transformation Committee, so she knew the state’s technical plumbing before anyone handed her the keys.
Government needed somebody who could tell a working system from a good presentation. It got one.
In her own words
She is blunter in public than her job description requires, and most of her sharpest remarks have been about the half of her ministry nobody writes about, which is national guidance.
At the World News Day editors’ breakfast in Kampala on 28 September, she described a problem every government on the continent is now wrestling with.
“Technology is really running so fast beyond our imagination,” she said. “News is running faster than reality, and then you don’t know what is factual and what is not.”
Her answer was not a crackdown. She argued that government, editors and regulators should first agree on who counts as a journalist and who is being regulated. “It’s high time we went down and sat on the table to clearly define this, so that we are all speaking the same language.”
Two hundred government communicators were trained in August 2025, and 197 laptops went to communication officers in districts. A 24-hour media monitoring unit opened at the Uganda Media Centre this year.
And at the data strategy launch in October she said the line worth repeating to anybody currently excited about artificial intelligence.
“Artificial intelligence is only as intelligent and ethical as the data that feeds it.”
What she hands over
She has always been careful about the limits of the office, and it is worth saying in her own terms. A Permanent Secretary is the Accounting Officer and head of administration. Policy belongs to Ministers and to Cabinet. Much of this was delivered by agencies the Ministry supervises or by other ministries running systems it procured.
There is a smaller detail that says as much as any figure here. She has belonged to the Rotary Club of Kampala Maisha since 2017, which runs a village project in Ntenjeru, Mukono. She chairs the board of a non-profit primary school in Wakiso. A woman whose weekdays went on bandwidth pricing spent her weekends on a village clinic and a school.
She is 48, and she is not going anywhere. Her new brief at the Office of the Prime Minister is coordination, which is the machinery that gets ministries pulling to the same plan. A specialist in how complicated systems behave over time has been handed the one desk in government that can see all of them at once.
And this is the arithmetic that explains the applause. More than three and a half million Ugandans have been paid through software she commissioned, and hardly one of them could name her. Eleven million learners sit on a register she replaced. A trader who registered a company in three hours last Tuesday has no idea whose signature made it possible. A young engineer in a district office has a career grade because a lecturer from Makerere thought one ought to exist.
That anonymity is not a failure of publicity. It is what the job looks like when it is done properly.
These are not slogans. They are things that work, and they will still be working long after the arguments about credit have been forgotten. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
